What Is Real Happiness?
Same Café, New Me: How I Found Freedom Without Changing My Life
“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.” ~Michelle Rosenthal”
Today I am sitting in my favorite café in Venice Mall. I got my favorite seat, the one near the water.
I have spent countless hours here. I have cried here. Journaled here. Drawn here. Consoled myself here.
There was a time when this café felt like my only refuge from a life that felt too heavy to carry.
Today I am sitting in the same seat, drinking the same tea, looking at the same water. And for the first time, I realized something. …
When Your Imagination Turns Every Problem into a Crisis
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” ~Mark Twain
It started with a clogged kitchen drain. Or maybe the drain was where everything else I’d been carrying finally surfaced.
Regardless, the water wasn’t moving. It was so bad that some of it backed up in the bathroom sink. Baking soda and vinegar didn’t help. Neither did copious pots of boiling water.
I felt my jaw clench, shoulders stiffen, and breath shorten. My brain, seeing a break in my supposedly impenetrable shield, saw this as a perfect opportunity to create a disaster movie screenplay on …
The Pressure to Excel: When Success Feels Like Survival
“To tie your worth to achievements is a recipe for suffering.” ~Brad Bizjack
Children don’t just learn mathematics, science, and languages in school. They also learn what success feels like, what failure means, who they believe they are, and sometimes, whether they think they belong.
When I was in primary school, my school introduced academic streaming. If there were four grade seven classes, the highest-performing students were placed in the first stream, followed by the second, third, and fourth streams based on academic performance.
On paper, it made perfect sense. Students would learn alongside peers of similar academic ability, and …
How “Missing the Boat” Led Me Somewhere Better
A few months ago, I found myself wondering whether I had made a mistake.
It is not a question I expected to be asking in my seventies.
Like many people my age, I sometimes think about retirement, savings, and financial security. I look around and see friends who spent decades building stable careers and preparing for the future. Some seem to have arrived exactly where they planned.
Meanwhile, my own life feels harder to explain.
I have spent much of it following opportunities that interested me rather than opportunities that promised security. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I should …
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 like to wait! It’s far easier to find quotes on the Internet about “seizing the day” and making something happen.
I’ve been an impatient person for much of my life. I wanted things to happen to me! I had a definite agenda in my …
