At a dear friend's funeral, listening to the remembrances made me realize how very many people she had impacted through her relatively quiet life. What if - on days when we're feeling small and a little insignificant - we could remember this? That we matter? That the world is a better place because we're in it? That would be a wonderful way to honor my friend's life.
I hate messing up. I hate it even more when I "get caught" making a mistake. I hate it most of all when my mistakes splash on others. Yet making mistakes seems to be an essential part of the human journey. In fact, mistakes are not obstacles on our journey to becoming good people. They ARE the journey to becoming better people.
I don't know why the human mind allows the negative to overshadow the positive, but it does. Especially in times like ours, we need to cultivate the habit of paying attention to even the tiniest good things in our lives. Doing so gives us the resilience to put our best foot forward no matter what is going on in the world around us.
My daughter planned a ski weekend for her birthday and we were thrilled to be invited. Yet I wimped out and chose not to go skiing. When I made my choice, I thought my fear of falling and hurting myself was keeping me safe - but it was really holding me back. Now that I understand this, I have to figure out how to choose differently next time.
Resilience is not about going back to the way we were before. It’s about moving forward as the person you’ve become because you’ve navigated something difficult and allowed it to form you into someone new, someone a touch wiser, someone slightly more evolved, someone filled with a little more humility and a little less fear.
Am I alone in thinking the world is a lot right now? It is natural to feel helpless in the face of the world's needs. An old story from the Talmud reminds us that if we each do our tiny, little bit, it is good and it is enough.
Happy New Year! This year a single word is my New Year’s resolution, my intention for 2026, and my word of the year. The word is YES. You could say I came to this resolution the hard way and I'm grateful that I did. After years of challenging, painful, and scary life events, I have learned that these events themselves are not what causes me the most suffering. What sucks the life out of everything is my resistance to what is happening. So, mostly because I have learned the hard way that NO cripples the soul, I am all in as I greet this new year with a resounding YES.
Several months ago, after flipping through an old family photo album, a friend looked at me and asked, "What happened to you?" I won't lie. His joke stung. But do you remember the old story, The Velveteen Rabbit? Like that little toy rabbit, what happened to me is that I became "real" or loved. From that perspective, I hope life keeps showing up on my face for years and years to come.
"It's me. I'm the problem. It's me." Taylor Swift has a point. 99% of the time, fighting what is happening to us causes more suffering than what is happening. If we can stop resisting, rejecting, and refusing whatever we fear, a surprising peacefulness washes over us. We find ourselves free to live our way through it - which is always much less awful than worrying about it was.