A DIFFERENT DECEMBER This December marks the first holiday season in 12 years that I have not been at the helm of a product based business. Most small businesses can expect to make a considerable percentage of their annual income during this time. There were some years at Zelma Rose where I would make up to 50% of my annual income in Q4 depending upon how many events I was able to squeeze in plus publicity and of course a bit of luck. I would start planning for Q4 in July with production schedules, wholesale orders, lining up events and making my best informed guess as to what would be a best seller between October and December. It was...
THE DECONDITIONING OF SCHOOL Welcome to another Brick in the Wall part two. Thanks to everyone who responded with your shared school experiences. School is great and weird and exciting and also horrible. Being part of a school group is a very large part of our lives, especially at our most impressionable and vulnerable. We are but children participating in an experience roughly 7 hours a day 5 days a week 9 months a year. It’s a big deal and most of the time we really do not consider it as such. Before we get into the specifics of my contemplations here, I want to share some data. I love data. I decided out of my own...
THE DECONDITIONING OF SCHOOL School was never my favorite place. Although, in my lifetime I’ve managed to spend nearly 24 years in school, practically back to back from preschool through graduate studies. Add professional licensure and that’s about 3 more years. I’m a few months shy of my 47th birthday, so that equates to more than half my life that has been organized around school. I’m not unique in this math and simply put, that’s an enormous amount of time for anyone to do anything. I love learning, but what I have come to understand from my own experience combined with years working in schools as a psychotherapist is that school and learning are two completely different things....
HOW TO HEAL FROM HEARTBREAK Joy is Now listeners will remember an illuminating conversation I had last March with artist, writer, and founder of People I’ve Loved Carissa Potter Carlson about Schadenfreude (you can listen to the episode here). Carissa speaks so beautifully to thorny and often overlooked topics of all kinds, facing them head on in a beautiful and loving way. She is so gifted in this process of illuminating the difficult to decipher. It's magical. While Carissa approaches a variety of often messy topics regarding the human condition in her art and newsletter , her newest musings HOW TO HEAL FROM HEARTBREAK (or at least feel less broken), explored with writer Vera Kachouh, take us on a new and deeply empathic exploration of heartbreak. Heartbreak is...
FULL GRATITUDE It’s okay to have felt big things this past week. Thanksgiving is complex. Or not. How complex is it really? It depends upon who you ask. The history of the day seems straightforward. Perhaps it’s the emotional piece that feels so complex. Gratitude is big. And we often assign it an expectation that no emotion can meet. To exist in the singular. Detached from any other feeling. Yet this is not how emotion manifests. No feeling exists in a vacuum. To my daughter Thanksgiving lacks complexity. She has never been exposed to the very much inflated Pilgrim story of Thanksgiving and wonders exactly what there is to celebrate about a group of White European Puritans claiming to...
