Author: admin

Thoughts for Thursday

+ Before I finally get to this blank page where I can get to my writing, I get slogged with advertisements for gimmicks to turn my “visitors” into regulars and customers. You, my dear ones, are not visitors. You are not customers. You are my treasured readers and friends, free to come and go as often as you please. You are my treasured witnesses to my thoughts, my emotions and my experiences and I am so utterly grateful for you. You mean more to me than you know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

+ From today’s reading of an article about Arthur Brooks, a famous and prolific researcher, these are the five pillars for a happy life: 1) Maintain your physical and mental health. Make them a priority. 2) Maintain healthy personal and intimate relationships. (there is not a specific number of relationships you need to have – I have always told my kids that when it comes to relationships, four quarters is better than 100 pennies. Just make sure that you have some level of connection in your life to people with whom you share mutual values and affection) 3) See and notice the beauty in art and in nature every single day of your life. 4) Maintain a reasonable standard of living and do some sort of work which brings you a sense of satisfaction and purpose. 5) Have a spiritual, religious or philosophical outlook which fosters resilience. In other words, believing in something bigger than yourself promotes hope and optimism, and both of these virtues have been proven to be excellent elixirs for your overall health and well-being.

+ I bought a cheapie knock-off of the Oura health ring for myself last month. (My husband calls it the “Poora”) This purchase is incredibly surprising to everyone who knows me. I would never, ever, ever (ever) be confused for a techie nor a gym rat. I have never owned an Apple watch. I frequently lose my cell phone. (We keep a landline primarily so I can call my cell phone to find it), and I tend to wear much blingier, gaudy jewelry than the Poora. Also, when it comes to my health, I can easily veer into the mindset of “what I don’t know can’t hurt me.” So surprising to everyone, and particularly most surprising to me, is that I LOVE my Poora health ring. I am particularly excited about checking my sleep score every morning, which typically looms around 90-100 unless my husband is having a restless night and then I scold him mercilessly. I don’t know if the health statistics that I am getting from my ring’s app are accurate or not (particularly since my ring is a Poora and not an actual Oura), but I don’t really care because so far the stats look good and I am a huge believer in the placebo effect. The placebo effect has always proven to be the best panacea for all that ails me.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

And More for Today

This is my second blog post of today. I’m feeling inspired. I’m giving myself permission to write because writing is one of my most favorite activities in this world. A thought came to me that I immediately wrote on my calendar (as I often do throughout the day, as thoughts of what to write about come to me). It was this thought:

“I can’t love you the way that you want me to love you, but I do love you in my own way.”

Is this statement the truth at the center of so many conflicts and hurts? Is this statement what is needed for true forgiveness of all others, and for one’s self? Sometimes we get so caught up in the ways that we want to be loved, that we forget that in the center of any relationship there is love, quietly and steadfastly beating its heart below all of the noise.

I have felt guilt throughout my life for not wanting to be what others want me to be. Sometimes I have conformed to be what others want me to be, only to later seethe in resentment. Guilt is not love. Resentment is not love.

I have felt frustrated and sad and angry when certain people of certain named roles in my life have not conformed into “being” the love which I expected from those roles. Love does not require others to conform into what I want them to be. Love doesn’t have requirements. Love is. Therefore I believe that forgiveness is coming to this statement:

“You can’t love me in the way that I want you to love me, but I know that you do love me in your own way.”

Now this is not to say that forgiveness means staying in relationships that are disappointing or harmful to you. This is not to say that boundaries should be dissolved nor does it say that you don’t need to work on nurturing and healing your healthy relationships with communication and earnest effort. It’s just taking the idea of “Forgiveness is an acceptance of what is” to a new level. It’s acknowledging an underlying love below all of the layers of damage, and pain, and frustrations, and wanting, and resentments, and sadness and failed expectations. It’s a reminder and a reassurance that at the base of all things in life, there is love. Love is always there. It’s just not a love narrowly defined by you nor by me.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ Today I scanned an opinion piece from the New York Times. I was intrigued because the title was “The Message from Texas Voters: We’re Neighbors, Not Enemies.” The meat of the piece did not interest me, as much as the title. It struck me as a description of the exhaustion I am sensing in the world at this moment. We are tired. We’re tired of running on anger. Of course, anger itself is not bad. Too many of us try to squelch our anger, and we only hurt ourselves when doing it. Anger turned inward can quickly turn into depression. However, anger is best used as that fiery starter spark, to get us going towards a change of direction in our personal lives, and also in the world, as a whole. That said, you can’t run a marathon on anger. Fire burns itself out. Anger takes too much energy to sustain itself for the long haul. Anger is the wake-up call to an injustice, or an unfairness in our lives. Anger is the passionate attention grabber which points us in a new direction, but then we need to shift out of our anger, to the determined stead of a calm, peaceful, faithful, directed vitality, heading ourselves into a better direction of our choosing.

+ Asian cultures give money in red envelopes for special occasions, to their families and friends. The red color signifies happiness, prosperity, and luck and also is used to ward off evil spirits. Every lunar year (2026 is the year of the horse), Chase Bank produces red envelopes, free for their customers to use. I picked mine up yesterday. (see below). I imagine other banks do the same. I hope that it is not cultural appropriation that I have adopted this tradition when I give money to the people I care about. I do it with reverence and excitement and my people seem to feel a little extra giddy when the red envelopes appear. (although they probably like the green inside, even better)

+ “Love is not born of thought. Therefore love has its own intelligence.” – Krishnamurti

You don’t think love. You feel love. You are love. Your thinker is just your brain, the computer of your body. Your organs are the doers of your body. Your essence, your noticer, your presence, your consciousness, your intuition, your spirit, the traveler inside of your body and experience – this is love. This is you. Love is you. You are love. And at their deepest cores, so is everyone else.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Aging

“At this age, I understand something I couldn’t have known earlier: aging is not about decline, it’s about distillation. You lose what doesn’t matter. You keep what does. The noise fades. The truth gets louder. What remains is clarity, gratitude, and a deeper relationship with yourself.

I no longer rush past moments, thinking there will always be more later. I know now that this is later. This is the season to savor—long walks, deep conversations, laughter that comes easily, stillness that feels like wisdom instead of emptiness.

Seventy-two has taught me that the real gift of time is perspective. You stop measuring life by what’s next and start measuring it by what’s meaningful. You ask better questions. You listen more carefully. You love with less fear and more presence.” – Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey turned 72 years old on January 29th. What she wrote about her birthday is quoted above. It was too profound to not include in this thought museum which I call Adulting – Second Half.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Thoughts for Thursday

+ Yesterday, in our bitter cold weather (for Florida), I saw one of my arbiters of “all is okay in the world”, walking at a clip, in short shorts. I have written about Dave W. on the blog before. He is an elderly neighbor (currently he is at least 85). Dave W. is tall, friendly, smart, athletic, always smiling and still sharp in his mind. When I stopped to say hi (me, in my heavy sweater, staying firmly put, inside my warm, cozy car), Dave W. told me that he probably should have not worn short shorts. “This is the first time in a long time, I can say that my legs are actually cold,” he said to me with a good-natured laugh. I always feel reassured when I see Dave W. out walking. Truthfully, I looked for him out on our sidewalks, all throughout the pandemic. I get a little nervous when I don’t see him out walking for a while, and so when I saw Dave W. walking yesterday, it was like a little ray of sunshine in my heart. A Dave W. sighting is one of my “touch grass” reassurances that life can be simple, kind, steady and good, no matter what is going on for me personally, or out in the world.

Do you have anything or anybody in your own life that is a touchpoint reminder of the solid good that is all around us if we allow ourselves to stop being distracted by all of the noise? I watched Lady Gaga singing a rendition of Mister Rogers’ “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” this morning. (Tell the truth, you are now currently humming that song to yourself.) Lady Gaga said that it was important for her to keep the purity and the beauty of the song, in her rendition that she created for the Super Bowl. Purity. Beauty. These things are still all around us. Look for the signs. They can be surprising and in disguise. In fact, purity and beauty may just be reliably walking down the sidewalk, in old, but sturdy, steady legs, in short shorts.

+ “Discipline is just remembering what you want.” – Kate O’Donnell I would add “the most” to the end of this quote. “Discipline is just remembering what you want . . . the most.” Do I want to be able to zip up the zippers of my mother-of-the-groom dresses? Then, despite currently wanting to eat that Oreo, I actually want to fit into the dresses, the most. Discipline. Sigh. (putting the Oreo in the garbage)

+ “Intention” seems to be the buzzword these days. Over the past weekend, we were discussing with our long time friends, each of our plans to be intentional with our relationships with our adult children going forward. We want to have happy, healthy, authentic relationships with our kids and their significant others and we talked about how we were all going about that intention which we share. The dictionary says that being intentional means being deliberate and having a plan. It says that an “intention” is an aim or a goal. Interestingly, the dictionary also says that from a medical standpoint, an intention is the “healing process of a wound.” I don’t believe that you can heal anything, without the intention to do so. Being intentional in life, seems to take “being present” to the next step of action. You become present with “what is”. You face any wounds and you acknowledge them, and then you make intentions for what to do to heal and to thrive.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Percentages

To start with, January 2026 is 83% completed. How does that make you feel? How has the start of this year’s journey gone for you? For those of you affected by this winter storm over the weekend, I hope that you are 100% safe and warm. Interestingly, I read an article recently that suggested that Americans spend 90% of their time and days, indoors. Over the weekend, I went boating with my husband and so on Saturday, I spent at least 40% of my time outdoors, and it was wonderful. It was revitalizing. It was a great reminder that since I am as 100% part of nature as the trees, perhaps a few more percentage points of time outside each day would make an enormous difference in my vitality. It certainly couldn’t hurt anything.

Over the weekend, I was reading an interesting book about worry and anxiety by the Japanese writer, Shunmyo Masuno. In one chapter he repeated the idea that many of us have heard about the Japanese people’s philosophy on healthy eating. From early on, the Japanese people are taught to eat only until they are 80% full. The idea is that 80% is enough to satiate you, and once your body gets going into the digestion process, you will no longer feel hungry, and you will have not overeaten. Masuno suggests that the 80% is enough rule applies to all things in life, besides your meals. He says that no relationship, occupation or membership, etc. is going to fulfill you 100%. That’s damn near impossible. However, if roughly 80% of your values match in any relationship or situation that you are in, it is likely enough to satiate you. It is enough to bring satisfaction, and yet still leaves a little intrigue and interest and friction and curiosity about the 20% of things you perceive or handle differently than others.

The start of the year is usually a big time of reflection and new beginnings for many of us. The “80% is enough” rule is a good tool to use, to see where we need to put our focus on changes that we we want in our lives. Do we get 80% of our needs met in our most important relationships? Do we get 80% of what we want and need from our jobs and daily activities? Does where we live make us feel at least 80% satisfied? Do the organizations that we belong to and affiliate with, share at least 80% of our values? This is not to suggest that we need to settle, or to stop trying to improve. It just means that the areas that have glaringly lower percentages than 80% satisfaction in the pie chart of our individual lives – these are the areas where we should put our focus. If in each part our individual lives, we are hitting at least 80% satisfaction, it probably is enough. The rest is just to tweak a little.

“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.” – Ronald Reagan

(The 80/20 principle is attributed to Richard Koch.)

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Not Static

I saw a quote from Buzz Aldrin today that I will paraphrase as saying that nothing remains static. People, places and things either evolve or decline. There is exploration or there is expiration. This is such a good reminder at this time of life when many of us are retiring or considering what we will do when we retire from what we have spent the bulk of our adulthoods doing: growing in one particular career field or vocation, and raising our families. Retirement hopefully spells freedom to explore and to evolve even further, in this new, interesting, intriguing stage of our lives.

This is the challenge of anyone’s or anything’s lifetime, correct? It is our choice to evolve or else succumb to inevitable decline. It is our choice to continue to desire experiences and to explore and to be curious about what’s next, and to learn more about our own selves and how to grow. If we have stopped evolving and exploring, then what is the point? This we know: We all have a unique and inevitable expiration date. Still, until that date comes, we can continue to explore and evolve and grow and be curious and learn new things. Otherwise, we just sit on a dusty shelf, already in a state of decline, waiting for the end. Nothing is static. All things are in motion. All people, places and things are either evolving or declining. We can decide the direction of our momentum and the richness of our experiences, all of the way to the end of our lives.

“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong” — N. R. Narayana Murthy

“All growth depends upon activity” — Calvin Coolidge 

“If you are not growing you are dying” — Unknown

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Funchy

I had to add the following video to the archives. This video just tickles me. I think I’ll be singing this song all day long. It’s these types of things that get me really excited about being a grandmother one day:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DSI64cgjf77

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

What She Said

Yesterday, I happened upon an article written by a sex worker, who by all accounts that I read, is also an excellent writer. I was too cheap to spring for the subscription to read the whole article, (that I know would turn into a rabbit hole that I would never be able to get out of – I’m always amazed with how easy it is to sign up for subscriptions versus how extremely difficult it is to get out of them – kind of like corn mazes.), but interestingly, I was able to read all of the comments about the article. In essence, the writer was saying that most of her clients were men who were detached and demasculinized by their exhausted, strung out wives whose biggest concerns were about how their lives “appeared”, versus how their lives actually were, in reality.

Now of course, plenty of the commenters were upset with the idea that a “high and mighty” man would go to a sex worker versus trying to communicate and work things out, or even deciding to divorce their wives. The commenters felt that the survey sample was skewed towards dishonest, snively men. But even more commenters related to the idea that women have been sold a bill of goods that they can have it all: the amazing career, the perfect family, the beautifully curated home, the taught, fit body, the elegant and fashionable designer wardrobe, the greatest sex life with their handsome husband, who is also the love of their lives, international vacations, the girls’ weekends with close, amazing friends, a funded retirement and the perfectly trained dog. And they need to prove that they have the “all of the above life”, by posting it on at least three different social media feeds, regularly. And by most accounts, what this striving has really lead to is not actually “happily ever after” but instead, high-strung misery. The article apparently referred to many “bossgirls” sobbing in the bathroom in earshot of their confused, uncomfortable husbands and kids.

The article was discussing women and men, mostly in their mid-40s. I am grateful to be a good decade beyond this fraught time in life. Every decade of age, gives more wisdom and grace that compassionately reminds you that there is no one formula for “the perfect life.” Not only is there not a formula, there is no such thing as “the perfect life.” There is essentially just your one life and how you choose to live it. And your life is not a performance. Your “image” is based on the subjectiveness and the varied beliefs and experiences of anyone who is “imagining” you, and thus you have as many images as the people who know you. You have so many different “images” that you might as well be a mirror looking into a mirror. And none of this is in your control. And which of these “images” is real? Do you even know which image is real?

This is an excerpt from an “Ask Dear Polly” article by Heather Havrilesky which I read this morning, where Polly is answering a question from a writer who is feeling insecure and wondering if they were “too late to the game” and should just quit:

“. . . This is the beauty and the horror of being a writer — or trying to be anything, really: You can feel important or unimportant. No one cares. No one is watching. You can have fun or you can suffer. No one is grading you. No one is invested. You can proclaim yourself ahead of schedule, or you can spend your whole life telling yourself that you’re running behind. No one is there to measure. You can suspect that you’re insecure and outdated, long-winded and short-sighted, high-strung and lowbrow. Or you can conclude that you’re charismatic, a teensy bit talented, never boring, and reasonably worthy. You have choices. You are the decider. Because the truth is, no one else gives a flying f*ck.“

Polly later discusses a conversation she was having with a friend and fellow writer who was also lamenting whether she was any good at writing and maybe should just quit. Here is the conversation she had:

“I asked if she was enjoying her work on her play. “I love it,” she said without hesitation.

“Then you’re in the right place,” I told her.“Whether or not you publish a thing, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

Why is it so hard for us to figure out that it is the joy of doing anything which we like or even love to do, during the course of our days, that is the real meaning and purpose of living a fulfilling life? “You can have fun or you can suffer,” Heather states above, and this is the ultimate truth. How much of your life is authentic joy, and how much of it is just a performance, or an “I should” for an audience that doesn’t even really exist? What makes you happier, doing what you love and getting yourself lost in it, or getting an occasional compliment, applause or merit badge for something that doesn’t even resonate with the deepest part of you? Does your life make you feel like you want to get lost in it, or are you always trying to always escape from it, in some form or another? Are you savoring, or are you chasing? If you are being true to yourself, you don’t need to chase anything.

If you are living your life in authenticity, ” . . . it doesn’t get any better than this.” What feeds your soul is your purpose to pursue. Amazing creators enjoy applause, approval and material forms of appreciation, just like everyone else, of course, but they truly don’t do what they do, for the applause or the approval or the appreciation. Amazing creators (We are all creators. Our individual lives are our major creations.) do their creating because it is their joy to create. And the people applauding them, are actually resonating with, and are being inspired by the joy that is emanating from a creator bringing something from their deepest, most authentic selves, into creation to share with our world. You’re not sobbing in the bathroom, nor are you needing to prove to the world that you are living a fulfilling a life, if you are truly living in the spirit of your own creative authenticity.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Unexpected

Yesterday when driving to my annual dermatology appointment, I witnessed the results of a terrible accident. Both cars were demolished. From news reports, the victims of the accident had to be extracted from their cars. So, on my way home, as cars were whizzing all around me, and cars were weaving in and out of lanes, I was admittedly wearing my sad, cynical, snarky (and defensive driver) hat.

I live in Florida, home of the infamous “Florida Man.” I believe that I’ve seen almost every bumper sticker and back window cling ever manufactured. Most of these stickers that I’ve seen are divisive. Most of them are political. Some of these car stickers that I’ve seen are outrageous, some are admittedly funny, and some are downright stupid. So in my “grumbly about Florida drivers” mood yesterday, out of the corner of my eye, I see (and hear) a bright, bright yellow Dodge Dart muscle car coming up behind me, and then moving up ahead of me. And then I noticed bright yellow letters, matching the car, on the back window.

“Oh, this ought to be good,” I snarkily thought to myself, with a snort for emphasis. I was happy when we both hit a stoplight so that I could get a better look, to prove my point (to my imaginary audience, I guess).

Here is what I saw:

“I hope something good happens to you today.”

Oh, wow, this was not what I expected. It gave me pause. I thought about this occurrence a lot yesterday. Obviously, I’m still thinking about it this morning. I got some lessons and self awareness out of this experience. Maybe I’m too quick to judge. Maybe I have more negativity bias than I like to pretend. Maybe if we all wished good things for everyone whom we come in contact with on a daily basis, the world would feel a little bit better and brighter and more hopeful, kind of like the happy, optimistic zip of a bright yellow muscle car.

Today, when my husband kissed me goodbye before he headed to work, I told him, “I hope something good happens to you today.” He smiled and wished for me the same.

Readers, “I hope something good happens to you today.”

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.