Reschool Yourself

Thanks to Jen Groves for the inspiration for this Blog for IDEC 2012 Week post.
I’ve never been much for taking on physical challenges, especially when there was risk involved. Skydiving, mountain climbing, and other extreme sports have zero appeal to me.
That’s why it was such a big deal for me to challenge myself in [...]

This is the final chapter of a story about Reschool Yourself that I submitted to a GoodReads.com status update narrative contest. Chapter 6 described what it was like to live in the college dorms again and attend classes taught by my former professors.
The holidays came and went, a break in between the fall and spring phases. January [...]

Although I’d had long hair for five years, one morning last week I looked in the mirror and decided that it really had to go. That’s the way it is with me and my hair. It kind of sits there for months and years at a time, and then suddenly, just like that, I can’t [...]

I’ve been reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, and in Rubin I have found a kindred spirit. I resonated with her writing from the very opening of her book:
I’d always vaguely expected [...]

It’s the moving boxes that have never gotten unpacked. It’s the cracked windshield that you keep meaning to replace. It’s the blog post that doesn’t get written…and gets harder to start with each passing day.
It’s inertia, “the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest.” And that physical [...]

The reason that I look forward to the New Year isn’t champagne, or the national holiday. It’s the chance to make a fresh start with a new vision collage.
Last year Darren, my friend Jamie, and I got together to make collages and presented them to each other. On New Year’s Day this year, we shared our 2010 [...]

It might be the Southern summer heat, or the way it’s kept me cooped up inside, but I’ve been a bit of an anger ball lately. “Anger ball” is a wonderful term from a wonderful movie, “Playing by Heart,” and it perfectly describes the way I’ve been feeling for the past week or so. My [...]

As much as I’ve intended to blog regularly, life has gotten in the way since last November. One of the main obstacles is that I’ve been doing writing and other communications for a living, and I don’t have a lot of energy left for my own writing. Plus, when too much time passes between posts [...]

I haven’t written too much on the Reschool Yourself blog yet about the key role journaling has played in my life, so I wanted to share this post. I was pleased to have it published on Create Write Now, a website by the journal therapist Mari McCarthy, who is healing her Multiple Sclerosis with the [...]

This is part two of my interview with Roger Fishman, author of What I Know. Roger traveled around the U.S. interviewing 10-year-olds and 100-year-olds from around the country about universal aspects of life. As I mentioned before, I’m publishing my Q&A with Roger here because the themes and values of the book match those of [...]