I grew up around guns. My stepfather kept one in his car’s glove compartment. That is, until the night a drunken neighbor shot a policeman responding to a call. After that, everyone’s stepfathers kept their guns in closets. For a while. I got a BB gun for Christmas when I was 10, and remember going out with my uncle that day to hunt birds. He mustn’t have thought I could actually hit one, so off we went hunting birds in…
I wrote the following piece as an extension of this tweet. It was a perfect late afternoon in early summer. Hope Baker was tending to a bed of yellow roses in the front of her house. In a few moments, her husband would be home and she had a special dinner planned – complete with a centerpiece of fresh cut flowers. Their daughter Michelle was on her way to Arizona for a job interview, and so they had the house all…
Not if you don’t believe, he’s not. So my advice to you is to believe. Believe in things you can’t see. Believe in things that defy logic. Believe in the power of love to change the world. Believe in your feelings, emotions, and gut. Believe in the impossible and the improbable. Believe in God, and magic, and most of all, yourself. Believe that every day you wake to face the world, miracles will happen. Believe. Believe with all your heart…
Just when it feels like everything’s going along smoothly, and the universal tumblers are clicking into place, I’m reminded of how hard it is to be a parent. Maybe hard’s not the right word. It’s always hard. But you don’t really notice how hard it is because it’s so amazing and life moves along so fast that all you can really do is hang onto the safety bar and scream. But then something happens and you realize what an awesome…
Here’s what I’ve discerned in my 48 years: Happiness does not occur as the result of the big, important moments that we *think* make us happy, but rather the small, seemingly insignificant moments that we tend to take for granted. What I mean is that if you can find gratitude in small things like sleeping in a house with a good roof, or having enough food to feed your family, or safely making it home at the end of a day…
We all like to think we can have a perfect life. We dream and scheme and execute intricate plans over long periods of time in the pursuit of things that we think will make us happy. Homes. Cars. Jobs. Even relationships. Why? Because these things are attainable. We have some semblance of control over them. And because of this, we pour our idea of happiness into these concepts – empty moulds waiting to be filled. The more we control, the…
