Tag Archives: inspiration
I blame Charlton Heston. When I was a little kid, the yearly screening of The Ten Commandments was anticipated in our household for a number of reasons. The first of which was its role as a rite of passage to, if not adulthood, at least big kid status, proved through the ability to stay awake through the entire thing. Alas, for many years, my brothers and I would consistently conk out on the living room floor somewhere around Yul Brynner’s…..
This photo is from a trip I took to Portland in August 2019. The hand is that of my youngest daughter. She and I were out on a walk, exploring her neighborhood. I thought that today, we could use it as a writing prompt. One of my tricks for breaking through writer’s block is to imagine different worlds within the various pictures I see streaming by in my Instagram timeline. It helps me to shift gears when I’m stuck in…..
Doing something new requires being willing to be bad at something until you become skilled at it. It requires humility and a willingness to fail forward. If you’ve paid attention to your life’s journey, chances are good you’ve experienced plenty of versions of yourself, and have been resurrected from the ashes of various trials and tribulations to get where (and be who) you are now. “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is…..
For a few years now, I have watched in horror as my country implodes through a self-inflicted massacre. Doomscrolling on Twitter hasn’t helped. If you’re really interested in watching my brain unspool in real time, it’s all still there. Twitter is a way that I process things. As a way to stave off the negativity, positive-thinking clichés cascade through my head. I use them as mental pitons to stabilize my thoughts as they spiral downward. Stabilize they must, because at…..
The picture above is of me at approximately 29 years old. Two of my daughters are with me outside the daily newspaper where I worked—my oldest daughter is probably inside the building, chatting up the reporters in the newsroom. My youngest daughter recently posted it on her Instagram (she’s the baby in the picture). She is currently 29; her older sisters 30 and 34, respectively. What follows is a bit of introspection and work-in-progress exposition for my next book. I…..
One of the best features of Twitter is the opportunity to connect with other people around a specific topic via online chats using a hashtag to “sort” the conversation stream apart from the rest of the flow of general tweets. These interactions expand my horizons, introduce me to other minds and concepts and also give me an opportunity to refine my thoughts about any given topic. Today’s post is about blogging, but more specifically, what inspires us to write. There…..
Now that the temperature is beginning to drop into the 40s, I make sure to get at least five miles in during walks around my neighborhood while it’s still relatively warm. Winters in Chicago are usually pretty soul crushing and claustrophobic, but the pandemic has ratcheted my despair levels to eleven. During my walks, I encounter families, dogs, hipsters, teenagers and other people like me who enjoy stretching their legs for some exercise. There are those I encounter regularly, as…..
You’ve probably heard of the phrase, ‘the calm before the storm,’ but there’s a calm after the storm, too. There’s a lull in energy—a drop from the frenzy of the storm—followed by the slow, methodical sifting through the wreckage it caused. Going through the pieces that were broken and altered by the storm takes time. Deciding what to keep and what needs to be thrown away is an exercise in discernment. Once you’ve taken an inventory of what’s worth saving,…..
For most of us, we’ve experienced over two years of some version of lockdown. It has been a period of trauma and uncertainty. Even with the vaccine rollouts, there will be months, if not years of recalibration ahead of us. Early on during Quarantine Life, I sent out a message in response to a “hustle porn” tweet that essentially said if you don’t emerge from lockdown without having mastered a second language, launching your next company etc., you were a…..
One day, I was taking a pizza out of the oven and caught my forearm on the inside of the door. I flinched and drew my arm away from the hot metal, but the damage was already done: within minutes, an angry weal had formed where my arm had touched the oven. I immediately took steps to clean and treat the wound and went on with my day. A few days later while I was brushing my teeth, I noticed…..