A friend recently shared an article on happiness based on the book The How of Happiness that was well worth the read. Now skip forward a few days and my daughter has started learning about personal success in health class in which her teacher is using the Andy Andrews: The Seven Decisions DVD series from PBS. She is really excited about it and has been sharing with us little tid bits of insight each evening at dinner. It is as though the universe is asking that I take a look inward and assess my current state of glee. It turns out that on some fronts, I am doing just find. But for as many things that I can check off on my happiness list, there are just as many that I could work on. Continue reading →

We live in a rural island community in the Pacific Northwest. We moved here almost six years ago in hopes of finding a place where things were a bit slower, color was abound, and crime was not an issue. For the most part, that is exactly what we found. But there were tradeoffs.

Things are calmer, but sometimes to a degree that can agitate me. The locals call it “island” time. It pretty much means that things will get done whenever the person needing to do it gets around to it. Businesses close when they feel like it. When we call to see when a restaurant is closing, we normally get a gentle pause as the person on the other end assesses the current crowd and how tired they happen to be. The most frequent answer I get is something along the lines of: when it slows down. I translate this to mean if I do not get there in the next 10 minutes, we are probably out of luck for dinner. Continue reading →