When I was a child I taped sheets of printer paper together in huge sprawling configurations so that I could then design my ideal houses. My mom subscribed to Southern Living and I especially loved looking at their house plans in the back of each issue. They had all sorts of nooks and crannies and dormers and gables and butlers pantries. 

Today I'm starting with mess and space constraints. This can feel like a real barrier to certain dreams because mess and space are so freaking tangible. It can feel like reality that you don't have enough space for your own kiln in your studio apartment. (Yes, perhaps objectively true.)

Not that long ago I was driving in the rural county where my parents now live in Virginia. On the way to their house is a little cinderblock cottage. It's small. Not fancy, but clearly the person who lives there takes care of it and it's a home. It has little touches like flower pots and some sun catchers in the windows. The paint trim, if I'm not mistaken, is turquoise- a highly idiosyncratic choice and clearly personal. 

the whole point of having dreams and desires is to delight in them! 

And bonus: our dreams don't have to be huge to be meaningful. 

As I mentioned the other day, it's easy to get caught up in having Big Dreams for yourself like new homes, relationships, bodies, bank accounts, writing books,  making art. 

The whole Ideal Life exercise is a common one in coaching circles and remains part of my work with clients to this day; however, I do think that we don't spend enough time solidifying why that's your ideal life and then how to bring small elements of it into your daily round right now.

This essay is the first in a series about the ways we withhold from ourselves the living our ideal lives. I’ll be linking to each part as I post them.

We are constantly doing- and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What wisdom can we find then in this cliched adage about being vs. doing? 

What do lowly root vegetables and New Year’s resolutions have in common?

Are you a resolutions person? Do you pick a word of the year? Is there a specific way that you participate in our cultural’s annual self-improvement orgy?

I’ve not worked that much (or even been in touch with friends and family aside from texts) because we have had Coronavirus at our house. And while I do run a business, it has not been business as usual.

For the first month or six weeks of this experience, life was hard and joy was hard to come by.

There’s no question that it’s not business as usual at our house these days. My husband began experiencing telltale symptoms the day after we left NYC in early March. About a week later, I was starting to get sick too.