First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt often gets credit for the line, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” The correct attribution may go to Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich who used that line in a graduation speech she penned for young students. Included in her list of advice was: Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up...
I had grown to love this resident. A chaplain at a senior community, I saw him at least once a week and he made me laugh. In his mid 90s, he had started to fail only in the last two months. I was informed over the weekend that his hours were numbered. I ran to...
This week I am leading a discussion at a senior community on ways to battle the winter blues. Here are some of my talking points. We’ve officially entered the hard months, the “dark ages” as the midshipmen at the Naval Academy say: the time of the year when the sun disappears and the pale complexions...
Although American poet T. S. Eliot didn’t have an advanced psychology degree, I think he nailed the reasons why so many people get depressed and anxious in the spring in his classic poem, “The Waste Land.” He writes, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring...
About once a week I hear the same question from a reader, “What keeps you going?” The short answer is lots of things. I use a variety of tools to persevere through my struggle with depression because what works on one day doesn’t the next. I have to break some hours into 15-minute intervals and...
