What I learned this week
Sometimes, surprise yourself.
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The Three Most Important Things
A few years ago, freshly divorced and trying to make a living as freelance writer, I found myself overwhelmed by the demands of my new life. My daughter, who has multiple disabilities, was then three years old and unable to be in childcare – none of the programs would take her. An erratic babysitter I…
On tumble-down gardens
My mother once gave me a shopworn gift for Christmas and said, “I’m giving this to you because you don’t mind broken things.” I’ve often thought about this statement. Over the years, it has come to mean different things: that I can see the value in everyone and everything, even if imperfect. That I have…
On how I work, illustrated
I spend a lot of my writing time doing this: By which I mean I spend a lot of my time staring out the window, not that I spend a lot of my time drawing sketches, although these days I spend a fair amount of time doing that, too. I call this, “Sometimes you have…
On listening to teenagers
This weekend I had the chance to hear a sixteen-year-old harpist play a Mozart concerto on two harps—playing one with his left hand and the other with his right, the type of tour de force you know he learned how to do not because someday a handful of people sitting on some wooden benches would applaud…
What’s your sentence?
I read Daniel Pink’s Drive this weekend because I have felt for a long time that goal-setting doesn’t work well for certain types of creative work but I couldn’t figure out what does work. I still haven’t quite figured that out, but at least I have learned I am not insane for thinking that sometimes…
On how the universe likes to toy with me
No matter how often I have yearned for long stretches of boredom, the universe never delivers them for me. Possibly because of that time after college when we found out what happens when I get bored. As much as I wish for unrelenting tranquility, I never get any. Not that I ever planned to get through…