The people of airports fascinate the hell outta me. I walk through the world looking for things that inspire me, make me laugh, or remind me there is still goodness worth passing along. Airports, however, can be a tough crowd. This past July at LAX, I watched people rush and push without making eye contact. Grown adults shuffled by in jammies and slippers. Earbuds protected them from accidental conversation. Families sat together at tables, each person devoted to a separate screen. A defibrillator hung beside the entrance to Burger King, which felt either very practical or oddly prophetic. The whole scene made my heart hurt. Did it always feel this way? I remember when people spoke to one another in...
Last Sunday I attended an autumn equinox celebration up in the mountains at an outdoor amphitheater outside of Boulder, Colorado. I bring this up because I was married there. Thirty-seven years ago. And I hadn’t been back until that Sunday night. Suddenly, I found myself choked up, hoping to be alone for a few minutes to collect my thoughts. The back story is that I was only 24, three months pregnant, just starting to show through my $25 garage sale wedding dress, optimistic and scared all at once, overlooking the uncertainty of this monumental decision. And now here I was, standing on the same rocks thirty-seven years later. It got me thinking: What do you know that you didn’t know the last time...
There is a great documentary out right now called, Apollo 13 Survival. If you’re not familiar with the story, on April 13, 1970, two days into lift off, an oxygen tank in their service module exploded, leaving three astronauts without most of their oxygen supply, electricity and other vital resources. Basically, the shit hit the fan. Astronaut Jim Lovell’s now famous quote came across the radio to mission control in five words: “Houston, we’ve had a problem”. A problem was putting it mildly as he calmly stated disaster beyond imagination. They were about two days shy of oxygen to get home at their current rate of speed. Together, with the astronauts, mission control worked tirelessly, chain smoking many packs of Pall Mall’s to...
As Labor Day approaches this Monday in the United States, it has me thinking about my own career path, a long circuitous road that began 36 years ago. A fresh graduate out of the School of Business owning exactly two suits and a beater Honda, I accepted a job as a financial analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank, our nations bank. Only about six weeks in, I knew I had to get out of the cubicle that was my prison. I was dying on the vine and I knew it. The hours would drag like months as I poured over the manuals I was to learn in analyzing banks. Yawn. Without warning or another job to go to, I got up, walked down...
Out on the vast plains and mountains of South Africa this past July, you could say I found love again. I was volunteering at a school and the kids studied me. Me studying them with a smile and a wariness, wondering if they would “let me in to their world”. We served a lunch and one by one, they sat on the concrete walkway to eat. I looked over and saw a girl, maybe about ten sitting alone eating her lunch. I went over and said hello. She just looked at me out of the corner of her eye, wary of me as well. Just when I was thinking I should probably walk away and leave her to eat, she patted the concrete next...
