Anxiety . . . is an illness of “what-ifs.” The mind takes the most minuscule threat and blows it up to–not even huge proportions, just unrealistically large ones.
Positive
A Skeptic’s Ghost Story
I’d like to say I don’t believe in ghosts, the spirits that haunt the human world after the body has ceased to contain them. Ghosts have stories; they haunt a place, […]
Three Things I Learned in PR
Working in public relations I quickly learned three things that have informed more than just my work, they’ve changed my thinking.
A Drop in the Ocean
Of course, there is no way I am going to fix a fractured world. There is no way I am going to fix even a fraction of it. But as Mother Teresa says, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.” Accepting that my contribution will be only a drop, the question becomes “where in the ocean will my drop fall?”
Discipline: The Thrill of Routine
Some people are self-motivators. They get up, look at their to-do lists, and actually do the things on them. These people can be very annoying. I know because I live with one. […]
Mourning the Loss of a Woman I Should Never Have Met
Madiha was my step-mother-in-law—my husband’s father’s wife. My husband’s mother passed when he was 16, his sisters, much younger, needed care. Needed a mother. Madiha became my father-in-law’s second wife. Madiha passed […]
The Vacation Thief
For the first time since vacation planning in March, I was grateful rather than resentful we weren’t vacationing in Europe.
A Friend Indeed: The Importance of Being Valued
There are some people for whom the term friend means pretty much what it does on Facebook: someone with whom they have interacted in some (presumably) pleasant way. I am not one […]
How to Graduate from a Pandemic State of Mind
I am buying graduation decorations and stringing them up. A big “Congratulations” banner will hang across the window on the back porch. The new outdoor lights dipping down from the upstairs balcony […]
Thoughts About the Future
1. Will there be hummingbirds? 2. Sometimes I comfort myself by thinking in geological time, astronomical space. When humans die out on the planet we call Earth, what other species will be […]
The Gloria Sirens 