Family

Each day is a gift for you to carefully unwrap. What happens next is up to you. You can cherish every second that you’re given or let time slip between your fingers. You can live every day with gusto and make every moment matter or you can be fearful and worry about what tomorrow will bring. You can reach out and make a difference in someone’s life or focus on more ways to better your own. You can pursue new ways to grow as a person or wait to see if the world stops changing. You can reach for things that’ll make you happy or you can be content with what you already have. You can drift along from dawn    Read more…

Our Family Values

Once upon a time, there was a brat named Phil T. Rich. He grew up with everything a kid could want. He had every gadget imaginable, a house that rivaled the Disney castle, and parents who gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted. Unfortunately, his parents were rarely around for him. And when they weren’t working “killer hours,” they were off to the club to play golf and trade gossip with friends. Phil knew that he wasn’t like the other kids. Whenever he wanted something, he snapped his fingers and it appeared — like magic. He didn’t have to work hard in school because he knew his parents would pull strings to get him into college and ultimately    Read more…

25 Thoughts for the New Year

“She called me a bad name.” “He took my toy.” “She didn’t like my dress.” “I had it first.” Ah yes, the thrill of being young again. Remember how important these things seemed when we were young? In retrospect, they now seem so trivial. Of course, as we get older and wiser, we focus on important things, like showing our friends how successful we’ve become, outflanking others to get a promotion, keeping up with the Joneses, and ensuring that we look young — forever. You’d think we’d have learned something from our kindergarten days, wouldn’t you? The truth is, we’re often so busy running on our treadmill to nowhere that we can lose focus on the things that really matter    Read more…

Remember your first date with that special someone? You spent hours combing through your wardrobe, fixing your hair, and making sure that the food and ambiance were perfect. You staged the “event” like a producer would a Broadway show. Ah yes, you may even have talked to the “big guy upstairs” to make sure that the weather would be glorious. The day finally approached . . . It was a HUGE success. (BIG sigh.) What was next? Anticipation (LOTS of it) . . . Your mind replayed every moment of the date more times than reruns of The Brady Bunch. “Did he have as good a time as I had?” “Should I call her now or would it be too    Read more…

When we were growing up, our teachers saluted great individuals who changed the course of history; during dinnertime, our parents lovingly recalled their idols; and of course, we had our own personal heroes who walked on water. They were wonderful role models. Martin Luther King, Princess Diana, Leonard Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Colin Powell, Helen Keller, Ronald Reagan, Bill Gates, John Kennedy, Vince Lombardi, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, Tim Russert, John Glenn, Mother Teresa . . . to name a few. There was something about these people that made them special. They led by example, raised the bar for us, and were simply the best of the best. We might have even wanted to be them, someday. We looked up to    Read more…

One day you have a baby and the next day you’re bringing him or her home. Okay . . . Now what? Sure, we’ve all been kids and vaguely remember our childhood, but that’s not a very good rehearsal for the real thing — parenthood. Becoming a parent is a little scary. No, . . . it’s VERY scary. On one hand, you feel like you’ve been thrown into the pool without first learning how to swim. On the other hand, being put to the test is a small price to pay for parenthood — one of the most exhilarating and rewarding experiences of a lifetime. As parents, we want the very best for our kids: to lead happy, healthy,    Read more…

Ever feel like you’re living life at warp speed? If you do, you’re not alone. There are many of us who feel like we’re doing more than ever before but failing to enjoy the fruits of our labor.  What’s the rush? We’re depriving ourselves of sleep to buy a few extra minutes, communicating in sound bites and bullet points, while riffling through volumes of information like never before. (Take a breath.) We exploit every millisecond in order to fit an additional activity into our day and then manage it all by multitasking like world-class jugglers. In the process, we have become a society with the attention span of a gnat. Please remind me again…why are we doing this? Oh yes,    Read more…

Food For Thought