Unabashedly Authentic

Picking up where we left off: the courage to engage the "other" points to the humanities as our starting point.

A college degree has become largely transactional in the pursuit of a first-job guarantee. This leads large swaths of our young potential into fields that don't align with fulfilling lives, where they can discover who they are and what they came here to do.

In Excellent Sheep, the 2014 book by former Yale professor and now full-time writer, William Deresiewicz, he wrote pointedly a…

I recently started reading the novel March, by Geraldine Brooks, on a three-legged flight back from Denver to Burlington. I came to a particularly graphic scene at Clement’s Mine, a fictitious Virginia plantation set in the 1840s, and realized this was not the first time I had read this very passage.

A few years back, this scene curdled my stomach. I had put the book down, telling myself I'd pick it back up another time. Each time I saw the spine on one of my next-to-read piles, my eyes jumped …

Why limit thanksgivings to November? 

Yes, you are correct: this November newsletter is landing in your inbox in December. Of course, I had every intention of sending this out on Thanksgiving, then on Black Friday, and then over the weekend. But life, as it does, intervened: a delightful Thanksgiving proper at my sister-in-law’s in Pennsylvania with three out of four of our children in attendance, followed by a swift drive up the NY Thruway to visit with our daughter, son-in-law, and three-mont…

What new couples don’t realize (how could they?) is that you’ll end up having the same argument—about the same core thing—for years, sometimes decades.

For Dave and me, that argument is usually about whether I’ve told him something. Just last week, I mentioned that I was going to book club Tuesday evening. He insisted I hadn’t told him. I was 98% certain that yes, I had told him. (I could even picture where we were standing in the kitchen, me scrubbing the broiler pan.) This verbal volley went …

Hello !

I am just going to be straight up with you. For a week (okay, make that two or possibly three) in January 2023, my motivation was nowhere to be found. Getting dinner on the table and walking the dogs felt overwhelming. On a scale of 1 to 10, my productivity was clocking in at a meager 1 when I typically hum along at a 7. This was certainly not the first time I've experienced a post-holiday, long-gray-winter funk. Nevertheless, I spent several days allowing myself to buy into the myth th…

Hello friend. It's been quite some time since you've heard from me. Where have I been, and why the radio silence? In order for you to let me back into your inbox, I feel I owe you an explanation. It seems appropriate timing, as January is "Mental Wellness Month."

As I've referenced many times in these missives, my family and I live on the east coast. My highly autonomous mother, on the other hand, had been living alone on a 340-acre ranch in remote Colorado with three dogs, six horses, and 25 h…

Earlier this week, I found myself in savasana in a Core Power Yoga studio in Colorado Springs. For non-yogis, savasana is the final resting pose at the end of almost every yoga practice, and basically involves lying flat on your back on your mat with your eyes closed for a few minutes. The enthusiastic instructor had a very Colorado-esque handlebar mustache and shoulders that flexed in ways that I didn’t know were possible. He guided us into the final resting pose as he intoned, “So whatever you…

This charming little sign has lived for years in a prominent place in our kitchen. I installed it there lest any guests get the crazy idea that we're NORMAL.

Starting at eight years old, I swam on a swim team at a local pool club. We’d leave the house at 8 a.m. each weekday. I’d hold on tight, one arm around Mom’s waist and the other gripping my towel, as we sped on her motorcycle down the east shore of the lake toward the club, the dips of the road memorized by my stomach. She had a Yamaha 250…

You can thank me now. I was going to write this week's post about ballooning college application volumes and what to do about them. Then, I got a haircut and felt a little lighter in a world full of heavy issues, and so... I digressed. Bear with me.

Today let's remind ourselves of the power of the small wins in life – like a great haircut – and the relief we feel when we realize that some of what we've struggled to communicate to our children actually sank in and we no longer have to worry abou…

My work is to help students open doors and create opportunities for themselves. I recently recorded the following 58-second video and posted it to Insta. I framed the information as an important tip for students to keep in mind during college visits. However, the point I address is broadly applicable to all of us and how we show up in life for nearly everything and everyone. In fact, it's a question we could each productively ask ourselves dozens of times a day:

Am I trying to prove that I am…