Would you decide where you’re going on a road trip, drive until you get there, then just zoom on past without even getting out of the car?
Or would you take time to enjoy the destination?
Tag: gratitude
Let’s not forget about giving thanks — really giving thanks and meaning it, on Thanksgiving and beyond.
We don’t all have a choice about our circumstances in life — where and when you were born, your skin color, gender and medical condition when you were born, the resources your family had were all dealt to you. We do have a choice about how we view our circumstances. For everything I can think of to complain about in my life,…
Michael Carroll, business coach and author of Awake At Work, suggested five ways to create balance at work, making work a more pleasant environment as an important part of our lives instead of only something to be shoved back to make room for life.
Happiness is a subject I frequently blog about — specifically, that it’s not just a virus you catch or something that happens to you, but like love or fulfillment, it’s something you consciously cultivate. So of course I loved this column by Jacob Sokol on Huffington Post headlined 12 Things Happy People Do Differently — And Why I Started Doing Them.…
So many people are stressed out today about so many things: why is my brother always late? will these lumps come out of the gravy? can you even believe how long that security line was at the airport? In a country of people who don’t really cook, we maintain this annual tradition of huge dinner parties, making foods many of…
If you haven’t already seen this video of pastor Joe Nelms giving thanks in prayer before a NASCAR race in Nashville, you’re in for a treat. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J74y88YuSJ8] I grew up Catholic and have heard a whole lot of prayers and invocations in my life — but have never heard such impassioned thanks raised up to God for the power and…
Today’s installment in the “Things I Have Learned” series comes from a colleague at my first job after college, where I worked as a reporter at the Alpena News. If you’ve never heard of Alpena, think cold. It’s five hours north of Detroit, and in addition to learning a tremendous amount about real-life newspapers, I learned such things as how…
Mark Zuckerberg, the gagillionaire founder of Facebook, apparently posted to his person Facebook page this spring that he had just killed a goat and a pig. No, not a sacrifice to the gods of Silicon Valley. Fortune magazine followed up and learned Zuckerberg has pledged to only eat meat this year from animals he personally kills. He wrote in an…
A few days ago I offered a list of Newvine Growing’s greatest hits — the posts I’ve written in the last two years that have gotten the most traffic. Today I’ll do the opposite and serve up a list of some of the least-read posts. I’m curating these to look for posts I actually liked that never got traction, as…
This is an encore for one of the very first posts I wrote on this blog, reflecting on January 2001 — 10 years ago this month. One day I was laid off, the next my mom was diagnosed with cancer, which would kill her six months later. My mom has been in my dreams a lot lately, I think reminding…
Margaret Yang recently won one of two Month of Thanksgiving contests here on Newvine Growing by expressing her gratitude for her daughter’s bus driver. Because Margaret won the “Who are you thankful for?” contest, I sent flowers to her house so she could give them to Miss Penny, the bus driver. Margaret sent two follow-up notes on what happened when…
I woke up just in time to hear a doctor telling my parents how I was lucky my nose had shattered because otherwise the bone would have driven up into my brain and killed me. It was hard to feel especially lucky at that moment. I had broadsided another driver who hadn’t looked to see I was approaching doing about…
Maybe some of you spent a little time going around the table at Thanksgiving dinner sharing something you’re thankful for? While the holiday is mostly about gorging on food and/or spending time with loved ones, there is this sweet notion of a holiday about counting our blessings and giving thanks. I’ve taken that a step further with Month of Thanksgiving,…
Early in my Month of Thanksgiving, I gave thanks for traditional jazz — but that’s not the only music that makes me happy. In high school, I hung out with the band and musical theater nerds. In college I was entertainment editor at our newspaper, I worked at two of our radio stations and spent a lot of time hanging…
John and I walked home late Thanksgiving night, trying to walk off a few of the thousands of calories we’d ingested with friends, and our path took us past a big shopping center down the street where crowds were lining up for Black Friday sales. I’ve never felt compelled to get up in the middle of the night…
On Thanksgiving, many of us will spend the day feasting on a ridiculous amount of food, only to lay around later groaning that we’re about to burst. While we gorge ourselves silly, the AgChat Foundation is urging us to give thanks for that abundance of food — and for the farmers responsible for producing it. They explain: A…
Several people submitted thoughtful entries in the “What are you grateful for?” contest — including those in the comments of that blog post, and a few in the comments on “Who are you grateful for?” that I think technically might be more of a what than a who. But rather than get all grammatical on who’s a who and what’s…
Today’s Month of Thanksgiving post is the winner of the “Who are you grateful for?” contest. It was difficult choosing just one winner, but here are some reasons I chose Margaret Yang‘s ode to her daughter’s bus driver: Many people wrote about their family, and I’m delighted to see so many people holding up the love of their parents, siblings,…