We have absolutely no control over the most life-defining things that happen to us. We can’t decide where or when we will be born. We can’t pick what color our skin will be or how tall or fat we will be or whether we will be funny or sad. We can’t determine whether we will […]
We live in a rule-driven society. We have rules for everything. We have rules that define “good” and “bad”; rules that tell us “do this and don’t do that”; rules that dictate how we should interact with one another. We even have rules that dictate what happens to us if and when we break one […]
In his 1933 Inaugural Address, Franklin Roosevelt told a country devastated by the Depression that it was his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Fear, he said, was “a nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror”. Respectfully, Roosevelt was only partially correct. We must also fear those that would use fear […]
I always thought that I would know that I was getting old when parts of my body started to break. My body, I thought, would send me loud and clear signals when it was time to start living in the moment rather than planning for an unending string of tomorrows. Well, parts of my body […]
On September 18, 2007 professor Randy Pausch, a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh stepped in front of an audience of 400 people to deliver his last lecture entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” With slides of his CT scans filling the screen at the front of the lecture hall, Professor Rausch […]
When I was twelve years old my Father, your Great Grandfather, died. Actually he died right on my twelfth birthday. He suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage on a Wednesday morning and immediately went into a deep coma. He never woke up. Two days later he was gone. My last image of my Father was of […]
When I was growing up my Father’s parents, my Grandparents, lived miles and miles away, in the Bronx, in New York City. Air travel was a very expensive way to travel from Cleveland, where we lived to virtually anywhere and as a result as a young child I got to spend only one week each […]