Vacation complaints…
Vacations are a national tradition (as is this perennial childhood complaint!) This post is of actual complaints received by “Thomas Cook Vacations” from dissatisfied customers. I think you’ll be as amazed as I was by them! “We booked an excursion to a water park but no one told us we had to bring our own […]
The “gift” of our breath
The phrase “take a deep breath” is misleading. The breath isn’t something we can just “take.” Breathing is a gift, a miracle, offered to us over and over again. Yet much like our health, we often take it for granted right up until the moment we no longer have it. “Remember to breathe” means remembering […]
July 4 humor!
Bringing you some humor for this special day of days. (And if it seems like it came from one who used to be a teacher, well, you’re right!) Father William, the old priest, made it a practice to visit the parish school one day a week. He walked into the 4th grade class, where the […]
The tide does come in!
No matter how bad our current situation appears to be now, nature guarantees a turn for the better. Change is always happening. Nature’s cycles are dependable. We can’t rush a seedling; pulling on it to make it grow faster will cause it to die. We can’t rush a baby; whevever possible, we have to let […]
A child’s story…
A little girl in second grade underwent chemotherapy for leukemia. When she returned to school, she wore a scarf to hide the fact that she had lost all her hair. But some of the children pulled it off, and in their nervousness laughed and made fun of her. The little girl was mortified and that […]
No pun intended?
The pun (also known as paranomania) is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term for an intended humorous effect. You can decide if you think these are funny or just punny! Writing my name is cursive is my signature move. I lost my job as a stage designer. I left […]
Which will you choose?
Before Thomas Jefferson said it, Epictetus (the Greek Stoic philospher) said that every situation has two handles-one that is an effective way to bear it and the other a way that is unsustainable. We choose, he said, which handle to grab. We choose whether we will try to see the best in people or the […]
Rule Number 6
Rule #6 is one of the fundamental rules of life…Do you know what it is? Have you read The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander? If not, you should! Two prime ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man burst in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his […]
The map is not the territory
We often confuse our map with the territory. But there is a difference between the actual world and our perception of the world, just like between the roadmap and what it intends to represent. As Alfred Korzbybski (scientist and philosopher who introduced this concept in a paper in 1931) pointed out, maps always come with […]
The Gap or the Gain?
Setting goals and moving towards them can either cause us happiness or unhappiness, depending on our perspective. (And our perspective is our choice!) The goals we aim toward are always somewhere between us and the horizon. The concept of the horizon is useful to figure out a direction and to plan a destination, but we […]