The Pits and Pieces

  Today, two musings on two unrelated topics, because reflections don’t have to be connected. Musings on Friendships : On a zoom session recently, one woman who I am only just getting to know, was singled out as being good at maintaining long-standing friendships over decades. It takes effort and intention to maintain friendships, as in other relationships. All too often, our friendships are what we will get to ‘when we have time’. We may bring our left-over selves to our friendships, after family, work, errands and other social commitments. Sometimes, the friendship pays the price, withering away to nothing. There doesn’t need to be a big blow-up, just a slow fading, perhaps as one friend backs away, realizing their effort is not reciprocated, wondering if the friendship doesn’t matter to the other as much as they thought it did. But in our later years, we learn to value the true worth of these relationships. Because a spouse or partner or child can never be quite the same as a

  On a recent podcast, I heard a discussion with researcher Marcus Buckingham about how the happiest women don’t try to find balance in their lives. Instead, they ‘tilt’ (his word) towards doing the things they love. A life of balance is an illusion we strive for. There is no such thing. If someone has their life fully in balance, one small, unexpected movement or intrusion could bring everything crashing down. Balance means you’re static, trying to hold everything up all at once. Instead, his advice is to move and tilt, embrace the imbalance. That’s fine, I thought, if you have the luxury to do that. But there are countless women who don’t,  who rush from home to office to errands to home and wake up early the next morning to do it all over again. But the studies showed that even overworked women with very stressful jobs reported being happier in their lives, if they spent at least 20% of their day, every day, doing activities they loved.   Buckingham says that every activity

  As the Easter Weekend approaches, I dipped into my stash of essays that I’ve written for writing groups over the years, and pulled out one that centres around one particular Easter Sunday when I was around eleven and making my debut as a reader in church (I no longer go to church, except for weddings and funerals, but I do love visiting churches when I travel).   I’ve shortened the original version of the essay a bit for this blog. * It is Easter Sunday morning, although the routine won’t be very different from other Sunday mornings: put on our best clothes and catch the bus to the 9 o’clock Children's mass at the Sacred Heart Church. But today, because it is Easter, good clothes mean new clothes for my sister and me. My younger brother dislikes new clothes, especially shirts, complaining that the collars are too stiff. But my sister and I delight in the new dresses we get for Christmas, Easter, birthdays and a tailor-made batch every other summer. This time I’ve convince