“Stay the course. When thwarted try again: harder: smarter. Persevere relentlessly.” - John Wooden

A new month, a new year, a new chance to write your story. 

How do you greet the new year? 

It’s November: the time of full speed ahead. The holiday break is in sight, but there seems like there’s always more to do, more decisions to be made, more work to be done, and needing to have a more focused approach. Whether you feel like huddling under a blanket in your self-sufficient pillow fort or forging ahead with the force of a bullet train, sometimes the world doesn’t give us a choice—and the only thing left to do is the next right thing. 

What that is is anybody’s guess. It will be unequivocally different for every single one of us. 

I grew up on Long Island, New York. Summer was and is my favourite season. For as long as I can remember, summertime meant my summer camp second home, and the moment I could drive meant any spare time spent at the beach. The ocean and sand are so much a part of me that I moved to live beside them for a decade (and later flipped coasts to relish their brilliance all year long).

In my youth, I spent some of my best summers at a rustic sleepaway camp on the edge of the Long Island Sound. Decades later, I can still tell you what those leaves smell like on a rainy day, what the beach rocks feel like on the souls of my feet, what color my tongue turned after drinking the colorful ‘bug juice’, and the taste of the crumb cake baked with love by Maryanne the cook. When crumb cake shows up on any menu, I smile—and no matter where I am in the world, one taste flings me right back to camp and the extra bites that Maryanne would leave out on the counter for all to enjoy. 

Life is messy. If only we knew that as teenagers, perhaps we wouldn’t have been so hard on ourselves about not knowing so many things—like what major we want, what path we wish to take, where we want to live, how we can best help make the world better, what we want to be when we get older, how much money we ‘should’ have, and all of the zillion other questions that rattle around our minds once we begin to think about how we might ‘fit’ in the world at large. 

It’s in a child’s eyes the first time they see Mickey Mouse. It’s in a parent’s face when they meet their new addition for the first time. It’s in the eyes of an individual when they connect with that person or animal who’s made a huge difference in their life. 

It’s arrived! That time of year where life feels like it’s full speed ahead and nonstop glitter-filled energy. The educational year is in its groove, every week there’s a game or a concert or a special event, and even taking a moment to find your own breath seemingly involves a calendar invitation. We’re officially in that final quarter of the year when resolution inklings creep in, ‘to do’ lists pile up, and many of us feel pulled in multiple directions. 

In these final months of the year, how do you tend to show up?

Growing up, I wanted to have that perfect penmanship. Taking notes in high school found me pressing hard enough with my pen to ensure I could feel the ink on the back of the paper, have evenly spaced letters and words, and quite literally rip out a page if I had to scribble out a letter. Needless to say, I had no idea then how much pressure and anxiety I caused myself in the process of seeking that perfect penmanship.