We all have this conversation at one point or another, about a co-worker, a student, a child, a friend…

(Sidenote: If you’re one of my students reading this now, please don’t fret. 99.9% of my interactions with you are entirely positive. I promise your secrets won’t be revealed in my blog… your life is your story to tell, if you wish to tell it.)

At the end of last semester, I had a “problem student” issue, a blip on the normally placid surface of my work day. It was potentially a big deal, so I wrote a stern email requesting the student’s reply. I felt mighty and righteous and a little angry. In my head I wrote a long, chastising lecture about this person’s behavior, confident of the accuracy of my insightful words. Sometimes the power of being a professor goes to my head like that.

The student came in to meet with me, and this student was visibly shaken by what had happened, apologetic, willing to make amends…

In other words, very, very human.

Of course, the lecture conceived was never born. Instead I handed over tissues, and listened to a genuine story of hardship that made it difficult for this person to complete the assignment I’d given. I granted an extension, the student earned an “A” in my class, and the bump receded into memory, my lesson learned.

I do this more than I like to admit. It’s easier, isn’t it? To see people as problems, to reduce the stark miracle of a human life to a series of inconveniences and annoyances.

The news media helps us along in this process. It reduces national disasters to numbers. And yes, the sheer numbers (such as in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti yesterday) can be horrifying, but they are still just numbers. The news also reduces us to red states and blue states, for or against, pro or con. Christian or not. Patriot or traitor.

It’s easy to hate “a traitor”. It’s harder to hate a poor kid from a war-torn neighborhood who was brain-washed by elders to strap bombs to himself, denied education and access to the outer world. Once we know the complex layers of each human life, gray areas creep into our decision making, and we’re suddenly faced with our own hypocrisy. For this reason the human mind creates stereotypes – it makes life so much simpler to assign labels to others, to find tidy boxes to tuck them into, to be cataloged and stored and forgotten.

It’s an act of great courage and insight to unpack your boxes and examine the contents. I became a counselor and later an educator because I believe in the power of this process. I believe that once we understand the humanity behind the “problem”, the problem ceases to be.

The soon-to-be federal case about gay marriage is an example of this conundrum. I’m willing to bet most gay rights opposers don’t have any close gay friends. And if they reply “sure I do” then they’re mistaken… Because once you know someone truly struggling to forge a life commitment to the person they love, so they can enjoy common civil rights and hold their partner’s hand as they die in the hospital, it’s hard to argue that gay marriage is a bad thing.

And so here’s the test for me – I need to remember that those who oppose gay rights are human too. Not a “problem” to be fixed, but individuals rich with depth and complexity themselves. See the rub here? Just when I think I’m evolved, I get bitten in the ass by another layer of my own ignorance.

And so the quest goes on. I’ll try not to see it as a problem.

And as one who has no wish to be a parent, all this insight is going to go largely wasted into the ether. So I though I’d share my newest insight with you, my devoted readership of two… maybe three.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about myself lately: in dating, I’m becoming the self-possessed 15 year old I always wanted to be.

Research and parenting have demonstrated that our self-confident, athletic, independent girls often become self-conscious, insecure, and self-destructive once they hit the teenage years. There’s lots of theories as to why this happens (for more, read the classic Reviving Ophelia). But academic answers aren’t always helpful to parents struggling to raise strong, healthy girls.

For me, the insecurity hit when I determined that I wasn’t as pretty or sophisticated as most of the girls in my middle and high schools. I hit my current height (5’6″) at about age 11, but I was a good 40 pounds lighter than I am now. So skinny, gawky (I remember one photo where my knees were most decidedly wider than my thighs), acne-prone, glasses-wearing, and generally goofy in demeanor, I learned just to keep my head down and only to show my true personality around those friends who loved me most.

(Kevin & Jessica, thanks for your love).

Dating was another matter. I didn’t then, and don’t now, fully understand the politics of dating. I mean, good god, who constructed this system?

Answer: we did.

Used to be, our parents would have arranged all this loveliness for us. The rules of courtship for heterosexual couples were clearly defined and everyone knew their place, male and female. Dating was a highly orchestrated game of chess, with few moves left to chance. Then in the 1940′s, 50′s, and 60′s (especially the 60′s), all bets were off. Men and women in the US shook off the constraints of their parents and started making their own rules for courtship. And if you have 100 million people making up their own set of unspoken rules, I’m just sayin’ – it’s going to get confusing.

Now, I am not in support of going back to a carefully scripted process for courtship. Those of you who know me know I’m a stark raving feminist and a pretty independent lass to boot. I like writing my own ticket, writing my own rules.

But a little guidance in the form of general principles for dating would have been helpful. So, in short form, here’s the words I wish my parents would have said to me, and I think all parents need to say to their daughters:

1) Don’t ever, ever, ever abandon your female friends for a man. We need each other. We need our tribe, our sisterhood. We sustain each other, we understand our mutual struggles, we share a common cultural history. The older I get, the more my women friends mean to me. No man can replace those relationships, no matter how good and evolved he may be.

2) You are a freakin’ catch, a stone cold fox, a dynamo of wonder, a manifestation of the feminine divine. The glut of lame family sitcoms (amongst other out of touch media options) portray wives and girlfriends as emotionally unstable ball-and-chains. (aside: I also believe these crappy shows stereotype men in destructive ways, but today, I’m all about the ladies. Men, your column will come later.) Here’s the real deal. Men need us, badly. They need our stabilizing influence, our counterpoint to their masculinity. We are vital and necessary in their lives. And you want a man who knows this. The others are just filler fluffs until you find the real thing.

3) Your body is yours and you can do what you want with it. You have full permission to say “yes” and to say “no” as you deem necessary. Nobody has any right to your body but you. So spend it wisely.

4) Trust your intuition, trust your emotions. Acting on your “women’s intuition” is often pathologized as neurotic because it doesn’t doesn’t conform with logic or perceived reality. We reduce our gut instincts to mere urges, rather than trusting ourselves to be the highly attuned, exquisitely intelligent beings that we are. Your intuition and emotions have wisdom far beyond (but in synch with) your mind. When your head, heart, and gut all agree on one person as your potential partner, you’re golden.

5) And most importantly: you don’t have to date anyone, or marry anyone, if you don’t want to. The concept of “virgin” used to mean not someone who was sexually inexperienced, but a young woman removing herself from the drama of courtship to find her own path, to find her true self. Imagine how much happier we all would be if we put all that energy spent on the pursuit of romantic love into falling dramatically in love with ourselves and our own potential BEFORE we sought love. So many fewer broken hearts, so much less wasted time.

Go, find your daughter, niece, sister, friend and share these with her. We need to remind each other of our strength and wisdom in this world. Now, go forth and date.

I want to frame this from the start in a lovely, evolved, existential type package but it may take me a few hundred words to get there. So bear with me.

The gray hairs, they’ve become more frequent than every once in a while. My knees make this not-quite-right grinding noise when I kneel down. And they hurt a little first thing in the morning. There’s this line on my forehead that doesn’t go away once I stop frowning. It’s happening – I’m aging.

This weekend I went on retreat at the Dwelling in the Woods and in the quiet I realized that I am not ready to grow old. And the first instinct I had was to reassure myself that I am not, in fact, old yet. I look younger than I am, I am fit and healthy, my family is genetically freakish in their athletic ability and overall wellness. It’s likely that I’ll live to be 105 and Willard Scott (who will be a head floating in cryogenic fluid by then) will marvel at how I don’t look a day over 90 when he announces my birthday on the Today Show.

But in spite of that first instinct to reassure the simple truth is it’s happening, to all of us, all the time. And this fear of growing old is poignant and sharp – I love running without awareness of my body. I loved being young and fearless and reckless in love and finances. I really, really like being the kid in my family.

And slowly, all of that is coming to an end. Not today, not tomorrow, but sooner rather than later.

I know there is something to learn, important lessons in this natural, eternal process of aging. And I will learn them. But for now, it just feels… sad. Right now I can only see the losses, not the gains.

I wondered, just for fun, what it would be like to age backwards, a la Benjamin Button. What if we were born at 90 and regressed through life to infancy. What would we grieve in the process?

About 65 we’d say, “Man I miss napping all afternoon. This corner office is nice and all, but having to be at work from 8-5 is for the birds.”

At 55 we’d say, “Geez, I used to be so wise. It feels like I’m getting dumber with each passing day. Why do I worry so freakin’ much? Where did that peace go?”

At 40 we’d say, “Everybody’s so stressed. Where did my time go? Why am I in such a hurry all the time? I used to move at my own pace and now I feel I’m on a treadmill.”

At 25, “Seriously? This drama is ridiculous. It’s like I’ve never been in love before, never had to make a career decision. What’s wrong with me? Why am I so messed up after all these years?”

At 15, “ACNE?”

At 3, “Now we’re talking. Naps and playtime. I move at my own pace. Lunch is made for me. Heaven. I’ve earned this after all this time and all this work.”

On an intellectual level, I’m looking forward to the wisdom I know will come in the next few decades. The freedom from interior drama and self-made crises. The financial stability of a life well earned. But right now, I can’t quite embrace it. I want to enjoy these next few years like a woman on fire for life  - enjoy the freedoms of a healthy body and a healthy mind. To meet my Benjamin Button self right here in the middle, and maybe invite her out for a dance.

So today I’m going to become her and give you a short list of my favorite things right now. Sadly, I can’t give you all a free car. I would if I could. You can borrow my 13-year old Subaru though if you’re really in need.

The List!

1) Awkward Family Photos. Right now on my desk I have a picture of myself at age 5 with my straight, brown hair in a bowl cut, wearing a ruffled white blouse and a pinafore made of Holly Hobby-themed material. I remember our school photographer looked like Kenny Rogers, so that’s what we called him. “Hey, Kenny Rogers! Can I borrow your disgusting black comb to fix my bowl cut?” This website makes me feel better about those years.

2) Vanicream. I will never buy another lotion or moisturizer ever after using this stuff. It’s made right here in good old Rochester, and it’s like a miracle. I live in possibly the coldest, driest place on earth, and my skin has been perfection since I started slathering this stuff on once a day.

3) Dwelling in the Woods. I haven’t actually been there yet, so I’m prematurely adding it to the list. But the fact that a group of normal people decided to create a quiet space for adults to go to reflect on life, eat healthy, delicious food, and decompress for a while just delights me. They deserve an award.

4) StumbleUpon. This site has replaced my facebook addiction. It’s my methadone. And I have found so many cool sites that are genuinely helpful to my life that I would have never found on my own. Try it, you’ll be hooked.

5) Flat Earth Tangy Tomato Ranch Chips. They say on the bag that these contain a 1/2 serving of veggies in every ounce. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but they’re really friggin’ good and if I get a spare veggie or two in my belly while eating them, then all the better.

6) The Clear Skin Diet. For my entire adolescence, my dermatologist (named Dr. Gross, no kidding) asserted that diet had no effect on acne. As a grown up type person who still struggles with zits, I think this claim is bunk and this book proves it. Acne is a Western disease, largely because we eat so much processed food and we’ve moved so far from our indigenous diet, rich in veggies, fiber, and Omega-3′s. I’ve already made some small, painless changes to my diet, and my skin has never looked better. (BTW, Dr. Gross was truly awesome in every other way, so I don’t want to diss him unnecessarily).

Enjoy, good readers! And have a happy holiday!

I work in a profession with many exceptional perks. One such perk is the 3-4 weeks I get off around Christmas. I do not at all take this generous gift for granted. A few days ago I was at the vet (with my dog, not just hanging out) and I asked the receptionist if she got some time off for the holiday. “Oh, yes,” she said, “We close for half a day on Christmas Eve and for the whole day on Christmas.” I had a hard time maintaining a “Happy Holidays!” -type expression on my face at that one. And I am aware this short “vacation” is the reality for many. One day off, two tops.

So what happens for me every single year is this: I look at my expansive three weeks off and think, “I shall accomplish great things!” For example, this holiday I was going to work on creating a book proposal for a memoir I’ve been writing over the past year. Also, I planned to work on my website, which is under development (by me).

Notice the word “work” made several appearances in the previous paragraph.

What happens, every single year, is that I find myself immersed in a string of days just like today. Here’s what my schedule has been like:

9am – Wake up from a coma-like sleep experience. Marvel that I slept in so late (as did my dog) without even trying.

9:30am – Am on couch with coffee, toast, sliced mango, and some yogurt. Holy crap, “Something’s Gotta Give” is on TBS. I’ve not seen this movie for, like, 8 weeks. I must watch all of it.

Noon – Movie over, dishes languishing in sink. Must arrange carpool to the Cities later today for salsa-dancing house party in Minneapolis. Make two phone calls. Am exhausted by effort. Have little brainstorm so decide to write blog.

That brings us to the present. Shortly I’ll find myself back on the sofa, watching “The Holiday” for the 937th time. At some point I’ll take a shower. And this afternoon I’ll go to aforementioned salsa house party with some good friends and eat delicious food, drink wine, and dance til my face aches from smiling.

At no time today, or tomorrow, or the next day will I do anything resembling work. Every Christmas holiday I find myself moving from one pleasurable activity to another, asking myself continually throughout the day, “What do I feel like doing, right now?”

I’m shaking my head right now as I write this, in total gratitude that I have this luxury of days – long, sunlight-deficient, cold and quiet days to simply do whatever I want to do, without any expectations to the contrary.

I heard recently (and I can’t remember the source – my apologies to the speaker) that Americans are good at entertainment, bad at pleasure. In other words, we know how to be entertained. We watch reality TV or go to movies, or play video games. All kinds of bright, frantic, electronic distractions to fill our time.

But pleasure, we kind of suck at. We don’t know how to savor our food. We miss the beauty of sunsets on a winter day. We don’t write or read poetry as a common cultural activity. Most of us our so busy hating our bodies that we fail to nourish or delight our senses. It’s an uncomfortable paradox.

Another word for pleasure-seeking is hedonism, which gets a bad rap in our culture. We see it as laziness, selfishness, non-productive and destructive.

But for 3 weeks this winter I am embracing hedonism, as I do every single year. It’s always unexpected, and I am annually surprised by how much I need it. I am quite disciplined the rest of the year; but for these three weeks, I am absolutely and totally not. And I feel utterly guiltless.

So, go, you fellow hedonist. You may not have three weeks, but I bet you have an afternoon. Put aside your to do list. I promise it will be there for you to pick up tomorrow. I also promise that nothing really bad will happen if you put aside your errands for a day. Find yourself on the couch with an amazing novel and a cup of tea. Drink a glass of deep, red wine and eat dark chocolate. Skip the run in the cold. Let your body rest.

I’ll end with this quote from “Wild Geese”, a poem by the wonderful Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Today, though, I have no ending. In order to protect the people involved (who I care very much about), I’m going to be frustratingly vague. The gist is this: A decision was made by someone close to me that impacted me (and others) negatively, yet we were not consulted in the decision making process; I talked to the person honestly about my feelings (and can I say? very kindly); the person became defended and entrenched and withdrew from all of us involved.

Clear, right?

Here’s the thing – I have a doctorate in (essentially) “how to have difficult conversations with people”. I will assert that I’m pretty good at it. Yet this whole situation went terribly and spiraled out of control in ways I never imagined possible. I woke up at 5:30 this morning having a hypothetical argument in my head with this person and it kept me awake for an hour. I so hate it when that happens.

You see, during these arguments in my head I am RIGHTeous and MIGHTY. I am articulate and cutting. Think Julia Sugarbaker from “Designing Women”. Just for fun, here is a clip of Julia at work.

Isn’t she wonderful? In my head, I am her.

In reality, I know I’ll never deliver all the brilliant speeches I’ve crafted over the years to combat the unfairness and pettiness and illogical behavior I see around me. Even though in my head, I’m always right – and fair and just. Always. Don’t we all think we’re right, most of the time?

And I like to think I’m a self-reflective person. So I sit down and consider how I might have contributed to the problem. Sometimes I find an answer to apologize for, sometimes I don’t. And in this vague scenario I’m writing about, I don’t think I did anything wrong.

So this is the ending unwritten: sometimes, my friends, we don’t get closure. We don’t have the final word, the problem isn’t sorted out, and there is no group hug at the end of the day. Sometimes people go away extra-angry, with a helping of resentment on the side. Sometimes relationships are simply broken, and little can be done about it.

It makes me feel sad to write this.

I don’t think I’ve ever read an article or a book on assertiveness that included the statement, “And in the end, in spite of your effort, it may be that this problem is simply never resolved, and your relationship is forever dented.” I supposed no one would sell any of those books if the truth be told. Why would I shell out $22.95 to discover that I can’t, in fact, fix every problem by using “I” statements?

So maybe that is the ending. Maybe that’s my kernel of wisdom for this particular life event. I can’t fix everything. So now what do I do? I’ll drink my coffee, and continue this day with a heaviness in my belly about this rift in my universe. Each day the heaviness will dissipate a little more, and eventually it will be gone, a memory. It’s not a Hollywood ending, but perhaps I’ll sleep better tonight anyway.

And here’s Julia again. Because really, I can’t get enough. One more. For the feminist in all of you.

So I had this mole removed from my back last Thursday.

I warned you. I promise it gets better from here.

I had a weird mole. They did a biopsy. It also proved weird, but not cancer. So they went back and took the whole thing off to be safe and now I have stitches and steri-strips and a ginormous Band-Aid on my back. It’s right between my shoulder blades and it itches like crazy.

The doctor warned me as she explained the procedure that back skin scars heavily. I will sport a scar about the size of a large grape or a small strawberry right in the middle of my back, where all the world can see it if I should wear a bathing suit or a fancy dress. It will be there for the rest of my life, cancer free but glaring in its imperfection.

As I lay on the surgical table on my belly and she described the scar to me, I felt and said, “Who cares? Go for it. Do what you need to do.” And I meant it.

I think 10 years ago this scar would have bummed me out. I would have felt some sense of loss about the marring of the pale skin of my back.

But my beliefs about my body have changed since my 20′s. Our bodies are meant to be scarred. They are surprisingly fragile yet amazingly strong. And if you’ve lived a life, you won’t leave your body behind without a little damage. I’m covered in tiny, textured reminders of life: other moles aggravated by too much sun in my teens; the pink scar on my ankle bone where I slid down a rock while hiking in the mountains near my home in Virginia; the small black dot on the palm of my right hand where my brother poked me with a pencil while we were play-sword fighting when I was three years old; and how my right ankle will be forever a little more swollen than my left after I sprained it the first time I got drunk.

They are more than scars. They are reminders, bookmarks in history. They are my 3 year old and 16 year old and 22 year old and 37 year old selves all melding together into the person I’ve become, into this body I inhabit.

And then there is the bump on my nose I inherited from my beloved grandaddy; the blue eyes I got from my dad; the way my laugh sounds just like my brother’s; how when I sit on the couch with my feet tucked up underneath me, I look just like my grandma Irene.

Women, we’re so hard on our bodies. We punish, starve, sculpt, cut, plump, straighten, alter, and conform our bodies until they look generic. Until they fit the vision of a magazine editor somewhere or the plastic surgeon who longs to make all his female patients look… just… alike.

But when we lose our original bodies, our authentic vessels, we lose our stories, too. The magic of our history disappears and it can never be regained.

So love it. Love all of it. I will love my new scar because it means I took care of myself and I dodged cancer. I will love it because it means I have lived.

But it’s been a couple of years since I’ve gone on retreat to a technology-free zone. The last retreat I did, back in April, was to a cabin at the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin. It had a TV with cable and a vast movie library. So in between reading, writing, and bouts of being spiritual I could zone out to Jack Black in “The Holiday”. I think they also had Caddyshack. It was a nice balance.

And 10 years ago when I started retreating, I wasn’t so hooked up to the internet. I had email and all, but I didn’t have a computer at home until 2003 when I started graduate school. I also didn’t have cable 10 years ago. So leaving behind my antennae TV and no internet wasn’t a big deal, it was just a notch or two off my normal daily life.

But NOW. Holy crickets. Being alone in the woods in a tiny cabin with no internet or TV is like detox. I was antsy, jittery, impatient, bored, restless, irritable. I was about two steps away from night sweats and chills. And it gets dark at 4:30. So about 6pm I’d look at the clock and realize I had HOURS of time alone, in the dark, to be spiritual, peaceful, and quiet. It made me want to tear through the woods howling and smashing into things.

So I sat and read my spiritual books. I wrote deeply reflective journal entries. I meditated. I listened to audiobooks about my wounded inner child. And by the end of the night I was so sick of the whole damn thing I decided growth is totally overrated.

Then I had a dream last night that spelled it out for me, what was going wrong on this retreat. I was in a talent show, salsa dancing with an unknown partner. I was wearing a very plain black dress and we were dancing conservatively. Then suddenly, the beat of the music accelerated and he reached down and lifted my dress off over my head revealing this incredible spangly blue and white costume that sparkled with life. And our dancing took flight. I felt resplendent.

I realized this morning that I’m not the rather sad, overly reflective woman I was a decade ago when I started going into the woods to be alone. I’ve grown wings since that time. And partially because of my retreat experiences, I’ve learned that I am dynamic, creative, and I need room to fly. Sitting quietly and passively silent isn’t me anymore, not all the time anyway.

So on my next retreat (in January, to the Dwelling in the Woods, thanks for the recommendation Jess!) I’m going armed. I still value the technology free time. So no movies or portable TV’s. BUT, I will take art supplies, audio books, puzzles, cards, the latest draft of my memoir to edit, a belly dance DVD, my juggling bean bags so I can practice, my yoga mat so I can at least do some exercise. I’ll take things of play that counter my serious side, so I can break up the stillness with laughter, counter the quiet with the vivid movement I’ve grown so accustomed to.

Because, really, the time in my life for only silence and observation have passed. Now is the time for action. I can still retreat, but I can also honor all sides of my ever-changing self. My time in the woods taught me well.

First, I’m reading an amazing book titled, “Undress me in the Temple of Heaven” by Susan Jane Gilman. It’s captivating. In it, she describes visiting Communist China fresh out of college back in 1986 when, as she describes it, “China had been open to independent travelers for roughly 10 minutes.” She was an admittedly inexperienced world trekker, so the whole experience of arriving in Hong Kong after dark, staying in Third World quality hostels, and navigating transportation (an eerie nearly empty cruise ship, save the hundreds of Chinese packed below in steerage) was overwhelming and scary.

Once in Shanghai, things began improving. She and her travel partner made friends, found a decent hotel, were adequately fed and figured out how to find toilets in the city. Then at twilight, in a crowd of people, under a sky rocked with fireworks, Susie experienced the glorious moment that all world travelers live for: she suddenly recognized with utter clarity that life can be a “torrent of wonder”. She woke up to the magnificence of existence, to the jewel-like quality of a perfect moment in time that can never be replicated.

I have these moments in my life travels and they are worth all the effort, money, and stress of the process. When I lived in Oregon, I remember fleeting moments in the dead of a rainy winter when the clouds would part for a moment and off in the distance I would see Sisters, three glacier-capped peaks of the Cascade Mountain range. And I would think, “Holy shit, I live in Oregon.” This is a miracle for a girl who never imagined herself living off the East Coast, so far from where she began.

During my semester in Paris, it became remarkably ordinary to walk past the Eiffel Tour or the Arc de Triomphe. But one spring evening I was walking home from the Metro station. It was finally warm enough to shed my winter coat so I tied it around my waist. It was twilight, that magical time just before dark when families haven’t yet pulled their curtains closed against the dark, so passers-by are invited into their intimate dinner rituals like honored guests. Everyone had their lovely tall windows open to the warm night, and the smell of dinner reached me, laughter, conversations in French. And I had that moment – the expansiveness of life laid out before me, a torrent of wonder.

So I mentioned two things striking me these past 12 hours. The second was a performance by the band Jack’s Mannequin on the Daily Show last night. The lead singer recently survived Leukemia, an experience any cancer survivor will tell you is absolutely life changing. One line of the song Swim struck me most: “The currents will pull you away from your love.” For me, this is the experience we all have of seeing our daily lives take us imperceptably away from that which brings us great joy, from the experiences that bring us life.

I suffer in winter from what I call the “Minnesota Coma”. It’s so dark, and so cold, it’s easy to inhabit sweats day in and out, watch way too much TV, and simply give up on the idea of a passionate life. Then I hear a lyric like this one, or read a book like Susie Gilman’s and I remember. It’s like waking up from a long and nonsensical dream. I feel this quickening in my life force, some place deep in my belly and it compels me to buy a ticket to Paris, or to sign up for a class, or to dance maniacally around my living room. Suddenly life comes back and I remember what it is that I love here on earth.

I’m at a time in life when many people give up. Waistlines spread, knees start to give out, travels are truncated to weekend visits with the in-laws, addiction sets in, houses and TV’s get bigger and more expensive.

Is this life?

I think not. Remember being 22 when the whole of adulthood was still a fantasy and life, though dramatic and a bit edgy, was raw with possibility? Why were we so friggin’ eager to leave that behind?

So remember it. This is your command for today. Remember yourself when you were raw, and real, and a bit afraid but truly hopeful. Remember it. It’s still alive in you. What’s left undone? How has the current taken you away from your love? And how can you better make your life a torrent of wonder?