“I have all the time in the world,” a confident, aggressive, thirtysomething financial manager I’ll call “Mr. Endless Time” told me, his therapist, many years ago. “I have plenty of time to settle down and be more disciplined and responsible. For now, I’d rather have fun, play the field, and enjoy my life.” Yes and no, I thought. He…
I left them quite intentionally, my blue-collar family, but now I can look back with great appreciation. They scraped together the money that my private-college scholarship didn’t cover, probably not understanding that it meant I would leave their world for one they would never enter—the reward and punishment of a good education. Decades later, I’ve learned to fake it, to…
Ever go to bed with the name of someone or something on the tip of your tongue? You just can’t quite remember it. Then you wake up the next morning, and bang! Mystery solved. This often happens to me after I watch an old movie on TCM, the Turner Classic Movies cable station. I’ll recognize an actor from the 1930s,…
Second Acts is a series of interviews with interesting people who discovered new pathways midway through their lives. I discovered Rita Golden Gelman when a friend sent me a copy of her book Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World (Broadway Books, 2002). It is her account of how, on the verge of a divorce, she shunned convention, sold…
The Russians have a saying: Work is not a wolf; it will not go back into the forest. In other words, don’t work so hard, because work will always be there. Yet we are often at odds with our work lives and out of balance from the stresses and complexities of earning a living. Office politics can be exhausting, and…
My independence from in-house imprisonment quickly ended when my freelance writing business dried up in 2008 while the bills continued to pour in. I landed a job as a copywriter at a pharmaceutical ad agency and girded myself for the adjustment to a 9-to-5-and-then-some world. But I was caught off guard by the age gap, made apparent during my first…
Last week I wrote about starting Zen’tinis, a conversational salon. Maybe, like me, you’ve been to enough cocktail parties, networking events, and informal hangouts and you long for the substance of real stimulation. You wish you could have it in an environment where you can learn the thoughts of the folks around you and share one or two of your own.…
