Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly

“I’m nervous,” my Cousin Tom said as I greeted him in front of the synagogue in Boulder, Colorado last week. We were walking into my nephew Jonah’s Bar Mitzvah, and Tom, a rabbi who was visiting from Tucson – a man who can, incidentally do a headstand at the snap of a...

  Why We Tell Stories

Because when our children grow up we can no longer strap them into car seats, which means they’re free to roam the earth as they please, and which sometimes means they down 5 shots of vodka with their new college roommates even though they promised themselves that...

Suzy Was Here

  “Come on Gal!  Hit the ball!  God dammit!”   This is the sound of my 77-year-old Mother shouting at herself during her tennis lesson this morning.   “No! No! No!” she screams as she slams the racquet into the ball.   “Move it!” she shouts,...

Telling True Stories

One of the best things about staying with your work for a very long time is that you have a chance to understand, year after year, what exactly you’re doing. Not even because you’re trying to do it better, but because each year your work reveals itself even more to...

On Patience

The other day on a walk, my friend told me that all of the big parts of his life were in flux; housing, work, money, love. None of them felt firmly planted, nothing was certain. And yet with all that uncertainty, he felt really solid. Meditation, walks with his dog in...