“Happiness is found when you stop comparing yourself to other people.” ~Unknown Stepping off the bus I was in shock. This tiny thing? With no doors in the doorways and no glass in the windows? This little place? With walls that looked like they were lone survivors of war? I would’ve been sure it was …
Tag: happiness & fun
We All Need to Define “Success” for Ourselves
“There’s no such thing as what you ‘should’ be doing with your life.” –Lori Deschene How often have you thought about what success means to you? If you’re anything like my younger self, that would be almost never. It’s not that I didn’t want to be successful. It’s just that it wasn’t something I’d given …
Why I Chose Authenticity Over Fitting In or Standing Out
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” ~EE Cummings For many years I felt like a fish out of water, but I desperately wanted to belong …
How to Stop Worrying About the Future and Start Living Your Life Now
“Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.” ~Henry Ward Beecher Retirement. A word that fills people with both excitement and fear. On the one hand, we’re excited about the possibilities that retirement brings. The possibility to travel, to try new hobbies, …
Life Is in the Little Things: Finding the Extra in the Ordinary
“The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.“ ~Jimmy Johnson “Write about what we did today,” my daughter said. She knows I often write once she is asleep. Dully I thought, “What we did today wasn’t that exciting.” Yet, for her, it obviously was. She gets lost in her experiences, deeply entrenched in …
I’ve Learned That I Deserve…
When I was growing up, my parents never spoke to me about what I “deserved.” They spoke to me a lot about what was “expected.” They were very clear about that. They expected me to be tough, hard-working, well-read, and smart. They expected me to help others, especially those struggling on the margins. They sent …
Don’t Forget to Appreciate How Far You’ve Come
“Remember how far you’ve come, not how far you have to go. You are not where you want to be, but neither are you where you used to be.” ~Rick Warren We’re always talking about how we should live in the now and “be present.” We shame ourselves for looking back at the past or into …
The Power of Waiting (When You Don’t Know What to Do)
“Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal.” ~I Ching Waiting has a bad rap in modern Western society. It’s not surprising that I had to look to an ancient Chinese text (the I Ching) in order to find a suitable quote to begin this article. We don’t …
Forget What Other People Expect and Do What’s Right for You
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.“ – Steve Jobs When we come to this world, we know nothing. We are all products of the societies that raised us and shaped our belief system with things labeled good or bad, right or wrong, normal or abnormal. I was raised in an …
How I’ve Learned to Fully Appreciate the Little Time I Have on Earth
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” ~Normal Cousins Recently, my grandfather passed away. His departure was difficult for me but it has also left me with something I’ll keep for the rest of my life—an unlikely lesson about life and gratitude. I …