In praise of Slow Booze: drinking more mindfully might be as easy as swapping mass-produced plonk for hand-crafted, small batch beverages. And PS Happy 10thanniversary, Pemberton Distillery. The best drink I had over the festive season was a small plastic glass of port-wine, infused with herbs and hawthorn berries that yoga teacher Natalie Rousseau…
Coding for Greatness
I’d just finished reading The Culture Code,a book by Daniel Coyle about the culture of great groups, when I drove through the night, blasting Mofro, up the snowy winding pass to Crystal Mountain in Washington. Pemberton skier Susan Medville, a freeskier and mountain woman originally based in Crested Butte, had invited me to join a…
May you find happiness under the tree (or all I want for Christmas is a compliment and the grace to receive it)
This is a repost of a column I wrote for the Question on Christmas Day 2015, because when I wrote last month about getting a compliment and wanting to duck away, I thought, oh god, I just keep going on and on about this. Turns out, it’s more of a four-yearly thing, so I’m a…
The Humble Art of Showing Up
It happened again. Someone paid me a compliment. To my face. A friend was by my side in that exquisitely excruciating moment and she laughed and ordered me to “take it! I can literally see you cringing away,” she said. “It’s true. You deserve this.” I was grateful for her. Grateful for the kind words someone…
Gratitude: attitude or platitude?
Is gratitude the fix-all it’s made out to be? I was invited to start a gratitude practice — by someone I admire immensely, an unlikely pusher of positive psychology. I had resistance to the idea. To the very phrase, actually, and its ubiquity. Despite my squinty-eyed reaction, I agreed to participate in a daily gratitude…
Forget freely, remember collectively
I outsource memory. I don’t trust mine. So, when I see something that inspires me, I reach reflexively for my phone. Snap. Screenshot. Store. As I offloaded hundreds of images onto my desktop the other day, to de-bloat my phone, I saw how pointless this had been – all these things I’d wanted to sit…
Falling upon kindness
6am. We’re pulling into the gas station at the southernmost edge of Squamish, when we realize that my partner has forgotten his wallet and ID. We’ve been up since 3am, our plane is leaving in two hours, and we’re 100 km and 80 minutes from the living room where the black backpack containing crucial ID…
Thanks for the Giving
In many ways, the pile of food was embarrassing. Not just because I’d clearly over-estimated what was required to host a not-enough-seats-or-plates-but-let’s-fill-the-house-with-friends-anyway Thanksgiving feast. Falling short as an elegant hostess is not something that bothers me. Where I didn’t want to fall short was in the actual offering, in the stuff to mound on top…
The Downside of Deceleration
Most of my life, I’ve been in a hurry to get to the end of the task, the top of the heap, the other side. Then, somewhere approaching the midway point of life, I clued into the fact that racing to get to the end was not smart, and I should start thinking about ways…
Letting Go: on the first day of kindergarten
You expected me to cry, I bet. Granted, I nearly lost it when I glanced over and saw my husband tearing up. But I didn’t. I held it together. It was time. Everything was signaling it – from the five year old’s dead-forward focus climbing up the bus steps and heading off to kindergarten, to…
