“Thank you for talking to me!”  His words were surprising, direct and intentional.  Yet they were woven warm with all of the enchantment and depth that makes a human being unlike anything else in all of existence.  His words were heavy and labored, being nearly lost in his thick Hispanic accent.  His smile lit a face deeply etched by the lines of … [Read more...]

Larry Elder said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”  How many of us have a bunch of wishes that are nothing but wishes and become nothing more than wishes?  As time goes on we get tired of wishing because they come to nothing more than wishes.  We assume that wishes remain only that and that they are not capable of being moved from the vague … [Read more...]

“That’s good enough.”  How many times have those words come out of our mouths?  The idea of this lackluster commitment to the living out of our lives has become so prevalent that we’ve learned to articulate it in a whole bunch of different ways.  The rather robust vernacular that we’ve created to wave off responsibility and say “that’s good enough” … [Read more...]

Most of us are quite familiar with the old saying about ‘assuming.’  In fact, the rather biting truth about that saying has likely bitten us more than once.  Yet despite this rather endearing bit of truth (as well as the scars that we carry around with us that evidence it as true), we nonetheless go through life making a sizeable amount of … [Read more...]

We all have our monsters, whatever they may be.  For some, it’s fear of failure.  For others it’s lack of self-confidence.  And then there are other monsters like fear of relationships, or fear of risk, or fear of being vulnerable, or fear of rejection.  Then there’s the more obvious one’s like fear of heights or confined spaces or crowds.  The … [Read more...]

We would all prefer perfection . . . I think.  Somehow perfection frees us from failure and pain and struggle.  It just sets everything straight.  Perfection makes the road smooth and always sets it in the right direction at just the right speed.  It eliminates the fear of failure because failure’s simply not a part of it.  Uncertainty vanishes.  … [Read more...]

Ever feel empty?  I mean that drug down, tapped-out, bottom of the barrel, the well’s dry, running on fumes kind of empty.  Most of the times when we’re exhausted we can reach way down and pull up some morsel of energy to get us through.  There’s that reserve, that back-up that we can typically reach into when we need to in those desperate … [Read more...]

Sometimes fully being oneself in plain sight can be viewed as rather weird or downright odd. Sometimes our uniqueness is labeled as strange, bizarre, quirky or slightly peculiar. ‘Different’ in a culture of uniformity is too frequently labeled as eccentric, curious, “out there,” slightly unconventional, eerie, a tad bit unorthodox, or being … [Read more...]

We make decisions all day, every day.  Whether those decisions are the redundant routine things that fill up most of our days, or those decisions are the seminal moments that alter our lives for the rest of our lives.  Some of the decisions that we make are conscious; choices that are the product of much time, rigorous thought, the balancing out of … [Read more...]

It goes something like this, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.  God bless Mommy, Daddy, Mark, Brett and Granny.  Amen.”  Simple. I recited that prayer thousands of times as kid.  It comes to my memory today as clearly as it did those many thousands of … [Read more...]