Women's March

I am so honored and proud to be part of the Women's March last weekend. The day before, I watched Trump's Inauguration and then stood amongst thousands of people in front of the Capitol the following day, showing each other that we are not alone.

Prescribed Fire

[photo from Yosemite hike, 2016]

Sometimes, we find explanations for life in odd metaphors.

When my college boyfriend and I broke up several years ago, I remembered it like a fire - heated and painful. It was like all the years we grew up together suddenly caught on flames and then burned down right in front of us.

Growing Up

[ photo: Gene Kelly in Little Girls of Rochefort ]

After telling my co-workers how stressed I was and didn't get how they weren't as worried as I was every day. They gave me a simple answer: the older you get, the less you worry about the details of work. 

As you get older, you will accumulate more things to care about, things that will matter more to you than data on spreadsheets. You will learn that the world won't collapse when things don't go right. Actually, in many cases, as you lose sleep about the minutiae, the solution will present itself tomorrow anyways.

I had always thought the answer was quite the opposite. That our lives should be centered on our jobs, that our work defines us and we should always strive for perfection. But as those wiser than me advised, our work really is important, but it is certainly not everything. We don't always have to take it so seriously. In fact, when we focus so much on the little things, we miss the bigger picture.

Here's to growing up and taking it easy.

Dear Lisa

A post on Dear Linette blog featured a letter Lisa Ling wrote to her younger self. I found the letter really honest and sweet how her thoughts completely shifted from when she was a teenager.

Read below...

Likability

Here's a cool piece of advice from writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

So what I want to say to young girls is forget about likability. If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly, because you are going to be so concerned with not offending, and that’s going to ruin your story, so forget about likability. And also the world is such a wonderful, diverse, and multifaceted place that there’s somebody who’s going to like you; you don’t need to twist yourself into shapes.

via: NYmag

Sheryl Sandberg's Facebook letter

Yesterday, Sheryl Sandberg wrote a beautiful post on Facebook about the loss of her husband and her period of grief. Her honesty is relatable to anybody who has been through mourning. As much as you appreciate and loved the time you had, you just want Option A, even though it's time to move to another plan. How very real it is to want something that had made you so happy that it breaks your heart. She reminds us that it's so important to live with presence and acknowledgment of others.

Read the entire post below:

my daughter - lena headey

Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones) wrote a beautiful blog post on Plan USA, a non-profit for the betterment and equality of girl's future around the globe. She writes about her hope for her new baby:

I am having a baby girl in six weeks. You have all been so lovely in your messages to me, and I thank you for that. 

My daughter will have freedom of choice. She will be free to dance, to sing, to be educated in the fields that spark her passion, to marry if she wants, to marry WHO she wants, to remain single, or to fall in love with another woman. She'll be able to wear what she wants, put on lipstick, and read books that spark debate and expand her mind.

She will be loved, protected, respected, and celebrated.  

All these things that should be, and will be, basic human rights, are a promise to my daughter. My humble request is that you give what you can and maybe - just maybe - we can bring about the change we all wish to see.

Human equality is one of my greatest passions the more I learn about the world. The conditions in which a child grows up, lives, and learns create the foundation for a healthy future. In order to get an education, she needs to go to school, without the fear of attack or failure. In order for her to be happy, she should be able to love whoever she wants, without feeling that she is wrong. When we build a community where children do not have to worry about these basic human essentials, they will have more freedom to discover and exercise their own passions.

I believe that the world is missing out on many girls' full potential.

Read Plan USA's article and donate here. Or make a difference for the child in your community, in any small way you can.

Terry Gross on living by herself

Last week Marc Maron did an outstanding interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross. One of her lines that strike out to me was when she talked about leaving home when she was a teenager in the late 60's:

"You know what I need? You know what I really, really need? I need to live alone. I need to find out who I am - outside of a group, outside of a marriage. I was too young to be committed... and I need to know myself... And I think that a lot of women go through this. Coming of age, when I came of age, when I started college in 1968... it was kind of understood that you grow up, you get married, you have children, and even if you have a job, that's the trajectory. And like I said before, I knew I wanted a different life, and I knew at some point that to have that life I need to know who I was. And without picking up on what other people wanted of me, or asked of me, or projected on me, or any of that, and that required having some room totally by myself, which I never had in my life."  - Terry Gross 

Listen to the interview here.

// misty copeland

I've been obsessed with Misty Copeland today after learning about her story on NPR. She grew up without a background in ballet, unlike most girls who got their training at a young age. But despite everything against her - age, family, money, race - she worked hard to get accepted into the American Ballet Theater four years after she started ballet.

What I love about her is how humble she is, yet her passion for the art of ballet is so strong, she's telling her story so young, minority girls could be inspired to reach for ballet too.

Oprah on Career and Life

Oprah gave an inspiring talk recently at Stanford on finding success in career and life. No matter who you are, we can all take something from this so we can find our own purpose in life and live to our full potential.

"Align your personality with your purpose, and no one can touch you."

Video from Stanford Graduate School of Business

// ted talk - regrets

Kathryn Schulz gives an eloquent explanation of what we regret about, how we feel, and why it could help us become better human beings.

{ on being okay }

[ photo credits ]

I believe that our world puts too much emphasis on 'being okay' all the time. It's perfectly normal and even healthy to feel tired, bored, stressed or sad during times when our body certainly feels that way. Perhaps a way to feel okay -- or even better -- is to give ourselves the pleasure in feeling everything there is to be alive and human. And with that experience, we'll actually move on to new feelings and understandings about ourselves and the world.

Sometimes things aren't okay. And that's okay too.

{ the concept of wholeness }

"I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that—I don't mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It's a really odd thing that we're now seeing people saying "write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep" and "cheer up" and "happiness is our birthright" and so on. We're kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It's rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don't teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, "Quick! Move on! Cheer up!" I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness." Ask yourself, "Is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if you're having a bad day, it is."


—Hugh MacKay

{ the closet }

Ash Bechkam has this inspiring Ted Talk today about what it means to be "in the closet". It's not just for the gays who haven't come out to loved ones about their homosexuality. Actually, we can all relate to being in the closet because as Beckham explains it, it's just a hard conversation. We should have the courage to own up to what's real and be able to live like we own our lives.
The closet is not a place where a person should live.

{ time to thrive - ellen page }

"Loving other people begins with loving ourselves and accepting ourselves."

{ mountain dew commercial disguised as a love poem }

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

-- Matthew Olzmann

{ clouds }

This video really made me cry and reminded me how important it is to live life full of love and to always keep going.

He was also the inspiration of a celebrity music video of a song he wrote called "Clouds".

{ mindy kaling }

“My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I’ve ever had in my life,” she tells me. “By the way, it seems like I’m … I’m just blowing my nose. It’s not because I’m sad.” She has allergies and a cold, she promises. But her voice breaks when she starts talking about how she sat down with a pen and paper and asked her mother to give her all the advice she could possibly give her before she died, and Kaling realized she’d never be able to ask her mother for advice again. “I said to her, ‘Mom, I’m going to be so lonely without you.’” She’s crying now but keeps going. “And she just said, ‘You have to be your own best friend. If you always remember that, you will always have someone there with you.’”

- Mindy Kaling from Vulture Article

{ I want a Tuesday kind of love }

“I want a Tuesday kind of love. The sort of thing that involves little dreaming and scheming; the sort of thing that comes paired with too-strong coffee and too-loud songbirds and the drone of the news at 6 a.m. or any time before the sky finds its identity, really. A Tuesday kind of love that isn’t indulgent, one that doesn’t stop the earth from spinning but maybe keeps us grounded in spite of all that uncontrollable movement.

I want to split the bill and pay the bills and not get lost in some unsustainable delusion where the rest of our lives become inconsequential. I want us to be human, I want to argue, I want to take too long in the shower. I want to hear about the horrific lines at the DMV, about a boss who doesn’t get it, about plans to pick up the laundry after work. I want stories of strangers on the bus, of a child who looked lost but turned out not to be, of chance encounters with high school classmates because these seemingly colorless instances are meaningful when filtered through the eyes of someone I care about. A Tuesday kind of love, breathing relevance into otherwise monotonous moments.

A Tuesday kind of love is this: commuting to work knowing that someone cares about what you’re going to have for lunch; understanding that you do not have to be your dynamic, charming, weekend self this time; this time you can butcher sentences and make bad jokes and trip over thin air and it won’t change anything. A Tuesday kind of love is when weekends and weekdays are one and the same, expanses of time where unpredictable, irreplaceable closeness exists, swells, bursts. Tuesday is directionless conversation about things that happened five hours or five years ago; it’s knowing where he keeps his receipts and when he has a doctor appointment; it’s ordering Chinese food or taking his parents out for dinner because they’re in town or forgetting to eat because you’re full of each other’s words and there’s just no room for anything else.

I don’t want to dream through our lives together, don’t want to sleep in, don’t want to put on my sunglasses and pretend that life’s a vacation. The fantasy is that I want to exist in reality; the fantasy is to be there for someone on a Sunday morning but also on a Tuesday night, when the haze and laze of the weekend has worn thin and seems far away as ever. I want a Tuesday kind of love.”

— I Want A Tuesday Kind Of Love

{ the power of introverts }

Susan Cain makes a wonderful case on the power of introverts, and this may even be the singular solution to change the way ideas are born.

“There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

“Solitude matters, and for some people it is the air that they breathe.”

Everyone is capable of delivering great ideas if given the opportunity to flourish naturally rather than against their own nature.