A friend of mine recently found herself in the most enviable of positions. She had two excellent job offers on the table and she couldn’t decide which one to accept.
The first one was well within her experience and skill set, rather like the job she’s been doing the last few years. The people seemed nice, and it felt safe. (more…)
Brilliant failures, a term coined by an organization that studies them, are those where people with all the right intention and commitment actually fail in their efforts, but then go on to recover and achieve brilliantly as a result of what they learned from their failure.
After failing to establish my career as a lawyer, largely because we kept moving countries due to my husband’s career, I decided to retrain as a journalist. Journalism, it seemed, could cross political and temporal boundaries. (more…)
It’s not just the weather that seems unsettled and unseasonal. It feels like we are experiencing cyclones, earthquakes and volcanoes not only physically but also politically, socially, and philosophically. Change is occurring rapidly and most of us are staring open-mouthed wondering what’s next. (more…)
When I was in California last year I attended a talk by the popular writer/speaker who goes by the name SARK. Her schtick is encouraging people to acknowledge their feelings, not to ignore them or deny them. Rather in the vein of ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ (as Susan Jeffers says) SARK encourages people to accept their feelings, even if they are negative, and let them be, but also to keep moving forward through those feelings, not giving them the power to paralyze us or hold us back.
She told a story that I loved. She had booked a driver to pick her up and take her to the airport. He was late and she got agitated. It got worse when she stepped in cat faeces and had to go back into the house to change her shoes. She was so annoyed that when the driver finally arrived she confronted him for his tardiness. (more…)
Loss is a universal experience of human life. No one escapes it. It may creep quietly, slowly destroying our hopes and dreams, or it may be shockingly sudden and devastating. It might clean us out internally or it may wipe us out externally. But we all experience the grief and pain of loss.
When all seems lost, when life deals a blow that sends us reeling and we have no idea how we will recover, we have a choice: face our fears or spend all our time, energy and attention running from them. (more…)
The new year is a chance to start over. New year, new life.
Although quantum physics proves that time is truly an illusion, and thus markers of time merely human constructs that help us shape our life and direct our desires into an orderly and manageable process, this is nevertheless a valuable opportunity to redesign and redefine what we believe is possible. (more…)
Valerie Plame is the real life protaganist of the new movie Fair Game. Plame is the CIA agent who had her identity revealed by Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby – or he took the fall for it, at least – to get back at her husband, Jo Wilson, who publicly refuted certain claims the Bush government was relying on to justify the invasion of Iraq.
There is a scene where Plame recounts an experience whilst undergoing training for the Agency where she, with a small number of others, was taken, isolated and then tortured – including sleep deprivation and beatings – in an effort to get her to divulge information about her classmates. Their intention was to find her breaking point. (more…)
The news of the week is the official engagement of William and Kate. Outside Hollywood, there is little that captures the imagination and rouses the excitement of so many young (and not so young) girls. The promise of tiaras, bejewelled ballgowns and coachmen and butlers seems to play to a primal sense of hope similar to that which we feel when we hear about lottery winners: one day it could happen to us.
This hope persists, even when it is so obviously against the odds (i once heard that there is less chance of winning the lottery than putting one foot in a bath and being struck by lightning). Statistical probability and logical reasoning have nothing to do with it. Somewhere, somehow and sometime, it will be us. (more…)
Here’s a beauty tip for you. Let go of your past.
The more ‘past’ we carry around with us, the ‘older’ we get. Age is deeply connected with the past. It is the very measurement of how much past we have. The more past we carry within ourselves the older we look and feel. (more…)
Relationships are, to use my friend Janie’s vernacular, slippery little suckers. Most of the time the people in our life are loving, supportive and a source of joy. Sometimes our relationships go awry. And sometimes we have no idea why, what or where it all went south.
We have all been there. We are tootling happily along and then suddenly, out of nowhere, someone in our life tells us they are offended at something they claim we said or did, and as a result it is all over. The friendship, they say, is done! (more…)