Regrets do serve a purpose. When we regret having done something, we learn from it so we can move on and do better. It’s when we decide to pitch a tent in those regrets and live there that they become destructive.
No matter how bad we messed up, wallowing in our sorrows will not help us, or anyone involved in the situation. Reparations may be due: make them. Apologies may be required: offer them. Then move on. At some point we have to lay aside regrets and get on with the business of doing better. Continue reading “Life Is Too Short For Regrets”
In a world that is filled with an increasing amount of noise, it gets harder and harder to hear what is important.
I have always said that a serious writer needs a work space of one’s own in which to write. For one thing you need a place that is out of the main flow of family life where distractions abound. For another, if you work on the dining room table, you are always having to pack up your stuff and move out of the way. This is not much of an issue if you only write short pieces and have little in the way of notes to keep up with. But if you write longer or complex pieces – or a novel – you use a good bit of material you must pack away every time you pack off.
Psychologists say that after-Christmas Blues (or post-holiday depression, in their nomenclature) is a fact of life for an increasing number of people each year. The reasons for this include:
Do you know that Jesus was not born on December 25th? Or in December at all? Americans tend to think of the birth of Christ as being in winter, envisioning Joseph trudging through snow with Mary on a donkey. But all accounts of the announcement of Jesus’ birth state that there were shepherds abiding in the fields with their flocks. Winter in Israel tends to be cold and rainy. Sometimes it snows. Shepherds would live in the fields with their flocks during the fair-weather months of late spring, summer and early fall, but in winter Jewish shepherds sought shelter for themselves and their flocks. They would not have been abiding in the fields during the time we call December.
There is a tendency for authors, especially new authors, to discount the value of the established and venerated publishing houses: those establishments that have for, in some cases, hundreds of years provided the readers of the world with quality materials to entertain, inform, and enlighten. But suddenly the reverent awe in which we have always held these firms is being besmirched, like graffiti on a church, by a pair of hooligans: a bratty upstart called Self Publishing and his sidekick Indie Press. Oh, sure; their cousin Vanity Press has been prostituting herself for almost as long as the Big Houses have been around, but she pretty much kept to herself and offered little threat to them.
You know how some commercials just make you smile? Budweiser has produced many of their Clydesdale based advertisements that have warmed my heart. I came across this Christmas ad from Sainsbury recently and found it humorous and heart warming.