Tag: 2025

NYE

Happy New Year’s Eve! I had to get my last words in for the year of 2025. I honestly really liked a lot of my 2025 experience and I almost feel guilty writing it. It seems that it is almost a universal thing to say and to read and to hear that “It’s just wonderful that this ‘god-awful’ year is over.” And yes, the political drama has been exhausting. And everyday life seems to have grown exponentially expensive. And it has been so painful to witness the wars and atrocities that are taking place all over the world. And it is frustrating that we can never seem to get on the same page to focus on solving the world’s biggest problems. And many, many people have suffered terrible personal tragedies and grief in their own private lives in 2025. AND ALSO – people got married in 2025, people had babies in 2025, people found the loves of their lives in 2025, people healed from dire sicknesses in 2025, and if you need more positive examples, there are outlets to read about everyday kindnesses, every single day. And I clicked on one of those “stories about kindness” just now. The article talks about a city in Texas that is running a “Grandma Stand”, where three grandmas rotate being at the stand, in order to offer free comfort, love, hugs and advice for anyone who comes up to the stand asking for it. One Grandma, whose daughter volunteered her for the job, had this to say, “Grandmas are nonjudgmental and loving people. Sometimes it’s nice to talk to someone who’s basically a stranger, but you still feel a connection with.”

Maybe we all could work on being better “Grandmas” in the coming year. No matter our ages, our sexes, our family situations, we could all work to be better examples of kindness, lovingness, compassion, and connection. If we woke up every day with the idea that our job and our purpose was to work the “Grandma stand”, wouldn’t the world be a better place? We all have an “inner grandma” and she’s just itching to come out and to offer up some sweet love to a world that we all seem to universally agree, needs more of it. If we honestly believe that 2025 was the worst (or perhaps feel a little “survivor’s guilt” because we don’t think that 2025 was all that bad, at least in our own personal lives), what would our inner grandma say to do? I imagine her advice would be something along the lines of doing and being more of the simple things we often universally associate with good grandmas – softness, kindness, wisdom, sharing treats, support, cheer, reassurance, warmth, unconditional love. Our inner grandma is essentially love wrapped up in the most comforting of packages. We just have to remember to give that package away. Our inner grandmas are strong in the softest of ways, wise in the most reassuring of ways, and beautiful in the simplest of ways.

I wish for you in 2026, to become more intimately involved with your own inner grandma and to accept her love, and her comfort, and her reassurance, and her wisdom. I wish for you in 2026, to share more of your own inner grandma with everyone whom you come in contact with, every single day, so that when we roll around to this time again next year, the universal judgment of the year we just experienced together won’t seem so harsh. It won’t seem so negative and hopeless and full of division. It won’t seem so desolate, frustrated, and hardened. I hope that at this time next year we will be reflecting on our past year, with our inner grandma’s lens and heart. And we will be focused on all of the everyday experiences we had throughout the year, and feel nothing but overwhelmingly grateful for this experiment of living “a one and only lifetime.” Maybe, just maybe, on this last night of 2025, we could connect with our inner grandma, and look at this past year through her lens and her heart and feel just a little bit better, as we enter a whole new year of our precious lives.

“If nothing is going well, call your grandmother.” — Italian Proverb

“Grandmothers are short on criticism and long on love.” — Janet Lanese 

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

Hello Again

First, I am going to trinkle these new “gems” I found onto this pile of life’s thoughts/reflections/wisdoms which is called Adulting – Second Half:

“A lot of things broke my heart, but fixed my vision.”

Marriage argument motto: “I have nothing to win, everything to gain and everything to lose.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin

“Those mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.” -Najwa Zebian

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” – Buddha

And from a really good movie, Jay Kelly:

“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” – Sylvia Plath

“Italy. What is it’s fatal charm? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places lost long ago.”

I’m sorry for a longer than usual absence, readers. The latest flu really got me. (and no, I didn’t get the flu shot, so maybe something to consider. . . .) I just finished one of those wonderfully cheesy, fill-my-eyes-up, 2025-year-in-review videos. It was honestly pretty compelling. These videos always remind me of just how much happens in one year.

Lately, I’ve been observing our human nature to sweep entire years as “good” or “bad.” We often take one monumental event that happened in any particular year, either to us personally (tragedies such as deaths, job loss, or happy things like new homes, graduations or babies being born), or out in the world (think politics, wars or ends of wars, natural disasters or major scientific discoveries) and we make one or two of those major events, the basis for our entire judgment, of an entire year: Good or bad. Then we pronounce blanket statements like, “I just can’t wait for this awful year to be over!” or “I’ll never have a year as good as this one.”

And yet, the video I just watched featured unbelievable Cinderella stories in all different sports, political shockers from both major parties, wildfires and floods and the rebuilding of communities, cultural phenoms, medical achievements and so, so, so much more that collectively happened in just one year, in our lives on this Earth. A year is not entirely “good” or “bad.” Isn’t it often the case that we sometimes look back at our “bad” years and we actually feel thankful for them? In retrospect, they were “good” years because they forced our hands. They brought more of ourselves and our own individual needs and desires and insights, to the forefront of our awareness. We experienced more, and thus we, in turn, became more complex, more interesting, more human.

Years are made up of our moments. There are a lot of moments in our years. One time one of my friends asked me this common phrase when I was being a bit tragically dramatic: “Did you really have a bad day, or was it a bad five minutes you milked out all day long?” Even our worst days, have sweet moments. Even our worst years, have lovely days.

The beauty of keeping a daily journal, is that you have a record of the moments – the “good” moments, the “bad” moments and a record of the days – the “good” days and the “bad” days. As a person who has consistently kept a daily journal since 2013 and has saved my calendars since 2008, I can tell you that most days are just a conglomeration of mostly banal, routine moments, with a few notably “bad” moments and a few strikingly “good” moments sprinkled on top – even on vacation days, even on tax-filing days, even on mammogram days, even on birthdays.

Sometimes I think we get a little bored with our everyday routine moments, and that’s when the stories play in our heads. That’s when our inner narrator starts turning annoying moments into horrific days. We all say we want “peace”. We all say we want “calm”, but the truth is, we often don’t know what to do with peace and calm. We get restless. So we stir up our inner pot to create drama and intrigue. Our stories of what happened are usually much more interesting than what actually happened. Aren’t we humans annoying?

Maybe the answer is to turn our inner label makers off. Days don’t need to be labelled. Years don’t need to be labelled. All experiences teach us something. We can integrate these experiences without the narrative. Our lives are not performances. Our lives are our moments, our days and our years. And we have the ability to live fully in each one of these moments, if we give ourselves permission and freedom to do so.

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