But it's hard to play defense against a player you've never encountered. Turns out that the x I was trying so desperately to solve in the equation was something utterly out of my control: another person and his secrets. I grew up in a household where one person managed and controlled all the money, and that one person was not even the one making the money. Some stuff becomes hardwired in your brain, even if you know it's not absolutely correct. This was one of those things.
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Designing the spaces we love
Perhaps the key to libraries is that their architecture invites that inquisitive mind at any age to come inside and embrace the known and unknown, the sought after and the happened upon.
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Finding a financial shoreline
I simply don't care about bean counting. In fact, Quinn and I took Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University program at our church when he was in high school. Dave's a bean counter; I knew pretty quickly it wasn't going to resonate with me despite some good ideas. That and he's one of those conservative religious guys who says things like, "Guys, you know your wife's gonna shop, right?" [barf!]
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Putting our money where our mouths are
In all the months of COVID, Dr Marry and I have eaten out very little. But one day this week, he came home early, and it was a beautiful, sunshiney fall day. I asked him if he would walk to my office to check mail with me. It's a perfect 1-mile walk, and on a day like that, it's a dream to traipse under the golden canopies of trees and crunch through the dry leaves under foot.
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Manage your stress or it will manage you
Stress is inevitable. Jobs, families, money, personal anxiety, mental and physical health, politics, the economy, a global pandemic...the list goes on and on. But almost nothing is ever better accomplished by a panicked frenzied state of being. And if it is, the price to pay is with your own state of mind.
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That rings a bell
There's no world as fabulous as the world of our minds. I hope you take the time you need to explore it, to seek out your greatest visions and hopes and then to go about letting your mind help you achieve them, too.
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Taking action, and I’m inviting you to join me
Are you ready to name your dream and to not only put it out to the Universe but to also do your part of working toward achieving it, too? Then this Personal Systems Disruption retreat is definitely for you.
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tempus fugit*, part II
I'm leaving this residency a less fearful and more inspired, thoughtful person. The entire time I lived in income-based housing, I said that I wasn't really working much because what job could possibly pay me enough to value the one commodity I have always prized above all else? Time. (Believe me, I look back on that version of me with some level of shame at that entitlement. Reality Bites is hardly comedy or fiction for me. #HardcoreGenXer)
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I’m stretchy-chasey, how about you?
Sometimes I wish life were more binary. I want to be stretchy. Period. I don't want to be stretchy and chasey, although truthfully, being chasey sometimes drives me to figure things out just to alleviate my envy. But it's hard to live simultaneously with those two qualities because the chasey feels like it is drowning the stretchy, and I know that the stretchy just needs more time.
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10 little days
But part of that speed is simply the unbelievable amount of creative content I have produced. The other thing I spent a lot of time doing in these past 10 days was walking. LOTS of walking. And I decided to catalog those steps because I used those walks, intentionally and unintentionally, as my dreaming, mental break time. It's in those down periods where my, and frankly most people's, best ideas occur. It's when I stop "thinking" and just let my mind be that I get past the surface and break into deeper thoughts. And I wanted this recipe card to be a reminder of that for me
