Dear Nicholas, Why should I or anyone have a lifelong fear of math? “Feel the fear and do it anyway” doesn’t work, at least not for me. Yesterday I included two bills with a bank deposit, a twenty and a ten. The teller at the drive-through had to tell me that twenty plus ten does […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, Good conversation today–face-to-face in person! Your coming to town only a couple of times a year does encourage focus in the therapeutic hour. Lots of good take-away especially about getting to sleep faster.   My notes:   For getting to sleep faster at night… Paradoxically, use a morning ritual. Start the day […] Read More

Nicholas, Doing some window-shopping today, I suddenly realized how many new and not-so-new trends I don’t take part in. I started making a list and I’m shocked. Am I old-fashioned or simply being particular? Not that I begrudge others the pleasure, but there’s a lot of very popular stuff I don’t do, including: *blue or […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I fell. I’m refusing to think of this as an “old person thing,” though I do know that physicians like to ask their more mature patients, “Have you fallen in the last three months?” as if that were significant information. Gardening in the Dark I was out doing some late-night watering and inexplicably […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, A man I talked with on a bus in 1970 emailed to tell me that something I said on that ride kept him alive in a life raft decades later in brutal cold 400 miles east of Gander, Newfoundland.  You can imagine how flattered and stunned I was. One of my most troubling obsessions […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, Thanks for the sneak peek at my whole adult life. It was a rare and enlightening opportunity–turning through the notes you made in our sessions from when I was twenty-four to when I hit sixty-four. “What my psychotherapist wrote about me” is not something I ever expected to read. Reading these notes was […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, We went to visit the wee lass, my newborn step-grandbaby, in her hometown of Krakow, Poland. Now I have a very extended family and a faraway baby to visit on Skype. The arrival of Annabella has widened the reach of my roots in the world in a way I hadn’t expected. We don’t all […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I rode on a plane. Came home and got sick. I feel awful. I’ve caught a nasty airplane bug, I’m guessing. And I am freshly awed by the power of a wee microbe, making a short visit, to bring body and spirit to their knees. It doesn’t take a monster illness to briefly […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I don’t want to say I’m slowing down. I don’t like the sound of that. But I may be on the edge of something  similar–no more overscheduling is one way to think of it. Or: allowing more time for things. Busy all the time is not the way I want to be. It’s […] Read More

Nicholas, it’s spring! the year’s true fresh start! renewal, resurrection, release–and lovely mud. And I so love playing in my yard, weeding and “breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” T.S. Eliot said it better than anyone, though the land is never dead really, just waiting to burst forth again. A Leaf Garden? In my woodland […] Read More