Live on purpose

Write Your Story With Intention I recently read a book, What Alice Forgot, where a woman lost 10 yrs of memories after a bump on the head and now found herself in the middle of an ugly divorce and not remembering her three kids. She feels the same toward her husband as when they were newly married (because in her mind they just were), but he has the memories of the years of biting remarks and arguments and hostility and can’t just “forget” and go back, despite her pleading with him to do just that. She finds herself ashamed at what kind of person she has actually become and the bitterness of her once-loving husband toward her. How did this happen? Where along the way did it start to derail? What compromises or insensitive jabs or apathy led to it? It’s definitely easier if we can AVOID the relationship decline, rather than try and go back (regardless of whether there is memory loss or not!). If each of us could get a glimpse ahead 10 years in our relationship, of our habits and ch...

The Years Are Short... I had a dream last night where I showed up for a family party and the 9-year-old Dalton was there. I was enjoying his sweet, silly 9-year-old self for a long while before I realized something about this wasn't right. I began questioning what it could be. "We both know Dalton is 31, right?" I asked Doug. "Yes," he said, and we both turned and looked at Dalton across the room. "But look. He's 9." I went and asked my dad the same thing. Same response. Until one of us spoke it aloud, none of us had realized this could not be real. In my dream I busted into tears and ran and hugged Dalton so tight, refusing to let him go. Eventually, he started making funny faces and doing silly things, trying to make me laugh instead of cry... like he always did when he was little. And I remembered those faces and silly antics and they were so real, so just like him... My heart was breaking because I knew, now that I had identified it, this was t...

    "It's only an island if you  look at it from the water." Besides Seinfeld (guaranteed winners), the movie Jaws is probably the other trivia night Doug and I could win in embarrassing fashion. There are many memorable lines from the movie -- think "You're gonna need a bigger boat" -- many of which are still well-known, loved, and used even 49 years later (Yes, folks. June 2025 will be FIFTY. YEARS. 🤯). However, a different, less-quoted line has always intrigued me. Spoken by Chief Brody as he defends why he lives on an island when he doesn't like the water. "It's only an island if you look at it from the water," he says. The obvious understanding for the scene being that he's fine living on an island because he has no intention of going on the water. So it's easy to forget/ignore the fact that where he lives is surrounded by water. A kind of stick-your-head-in-the-sand mentality. Which works...for awhile. And then you have to go...

The things we forget to remember... So, I am reading this book, What Alice Forgot , by Liane Moriarty. It's about this woman who lost 10 years of memories with a bump on the head. She wakes up to find herself getting ready to turn 40, with three kids, and getting divorced, rather than 29, madly in love, and getting ready to have her first baby. She doesn’t remember her kids. And she feels the same about her husband as when they were newly married, but keeps running into the uncomfortable wall of him having the memories of the past 10 years, including the decline of their relationship, that he can’t just “forget” and go back to being the people they were before. Ashamed over the kind of person she has (evidently) become and shocked by the bitterness of her once-loving husband toward her, she is wondering, "How did this happen? Where along the way did we go wrong?" It got me thinking while I was running (shocking!) about my own life and the changes from decade to decade. I ...

You know how sometimes something so simple, some thought or idea you've heard before a thousand times or a thousand different ways, suddenly plays differently to your ears? Maybe it was the arrangement of the words, the environment it was said in, or there was a twist or nugget of truth included you hadn't thought of before...and a lightbulb goes off. You get it. This common idea suddenly shines like a brand-new penny and seems new or exciting or understandable or doable.   This happened to me this week when my brother posted something on his businesses Facebook page (the award-winning Big Blue Moving in northern KY - shameless plug!) in honor of World Parkinson's Day. Many of you know this is a disease that hits close to home for us since our mom suffers with Parkinson's. Part of his post included the below picture: It's all good and worthy of a read. A fitting tribute to the 1 million Americans and 10 million worldwide living with PD (www.parkinson.org/understandi...

A Charmed Life An Interview with Barbara Kerr I can completely lose track of time while sitting and talking to an older adult (which, incidentally, I have to keep redefining the older and older I get!). I don’t know what it is, but I find a lifetime lived with all the experiences and loves and successes and failures and losses and lessons irresistibly interesting. I know a lot of times older people get overlooked and easily dismissed, viewed only through the lens of their current age or limitations or abilities, forgetting a whole life was lived prior to our meeting them. A life just like the one we are living - with hopes and dreams, families and careers, talents and achievements. Sometimes even with significant contributions to our community or to the world. And often they are still making them! We forget that beyond being a wealth of knowledge from lived experience, many have led downright interesting and exciting lives. Some were trailblazers in their field or firsts in their famil...

I had a dream Friday night that was really disturbing. I dreamed that I woke up in the morning to find out five years had passed since I went to bed the night before. Five years that I could not remember. Doug had difficulty convincing me it was true, and what I remember feeling the most as he described all of these events that had occurred in our lives over the past years, besides discombobulated, was the sheer devastation that I had "missed" five years with him. Meeting later in life gives us limited time anyway, (which obviously my subconscious also worries about given this dream) and now, for me at least, I had lost five more years since I had no memories of them.   I have always had difficulty with time passing. I remember as Dalton was growing up, every night as I reached over to turn off my lamp and go to sleep, I had that desperate feeling of another day of his childhood gone. Another day closer to the day he leaves and heads out on his own. I feel it now with my pare...

The Art of a Hug I am sure we all have heard of the benefits of human touch and specifically a hug, and likely have many times offered one to a friend having a bad day, or a family member in a time of stress or grief. If you grew up in a family anything like mine, you probably have hug calluses after a family get together. We are huggers, whether you are or not, so beware if you ever come to a family function. You have been warned. I have a brother-in-law, we'll call him Paul, because that's his name, who is a great hugger. The kind of hugger who leaves you thinking "I CAN start my own business!" by the time he's done with you.  But have you ever wondered WHY a hug is so therapeutic? Like on a cellular level what the heck is happening that can change our mood if we're mad, reduce our stress when nothing has actually changed in our situation, make us feel better even though we're in the middle of being sad? I had some sessions with a counselor last year reg...

        YOUER THAN YOU         Be authentic, be yourself, be real. We’ve all heard these buzz words and felt the push to not be afraid to show our true self, honestly and unapologetically. But what does that mean exactly, and is it always the wise, preferred method of being, or behaving? When I started thinking about what authenticity is and what it looks like to be authentic, I instead kept finding myself identifying what it is not. Here’s the list I came up with. Authenticity is not over-sharing, having a lack of boundaries, or just imitating others. It is not being unfiltered, or showing off, or attention-seeking. It is not manipulative, trying to gain the upper hand, or winning validation. Based on this list I was then able to come up with the following list of what authenticity is : staying true to, and standing up for, your principles and ideals; being vulnerable; accepting your strengths and weaknesses; showing humility; consistency in...