A teenager leaving home wants to know the single biggest thing I’ve learned
We were hiking The Dispea, a famous eight-mile trail in Marin that starts with 1,000 steps. My seventeen-year-old, a casual athlete who might amuse herself with a swim, a run and a speed bag session all in the same long pandemic day, was forever just up around the next corner. Finally, the lunch break that was my raison-d’etre was upon us and we sat down side by side looking at the Pacific Ocean. After a few deep breaths, Claire passed me my egg sandwich and said, “So I was thinking on the trail, what do I need to know from…
The six things she says you can do right now to support women and women’s rights worldwide
Let me start by saying that talking one-on-one to Melinda Gates for a good hour about her takeaways after 2+ decades of research, travel, observation, collaboration, maddening failures and massive successes was what my dad would call a Lifetime High. She is in this work deep. Changing the world is her whole life. And she is determined to do it smart.
She has refined a point of view that helps her decide what is and is not worth doing. She also has a carefully developed approach to whatever piece of the puzzle she is trying to place into the whole…
I have been painting like crazy since the lead blanket of the pandemic made the days dark and the living heavy. Pools, tennis courts, bathtubs. Cake, beach chairs, kayakers. I set up a table on sawhorses in the garage and put on some Nathaniel Rateliff and sometimes crack into a hard kombucha. Within minutes, my hands are covered in color — which means I cannot touch my phone or laptop.
I am not super great at painting (good work requires a kind of patience I find elusive) and no one but my mother would want my stuff in her house…
A sweet little old lady I know and love fell last week — a corner of a rug had rolled up and made the perfect trip wire. She broke 4 ribs, her shoulder blade and a vertebrae. Now in rehab, we caught up this morning and she said a thing that made me smile and shake my head at the same time. I asked her how the food is at the place and she said, “Not so good but that’s not all bad, maybe I’ll lose some weight.” It was jokey and maybe a touch true too.
The amount of…
I’m not a fan of Disneyland, not really. Or I wasn’t. Until I met Devone and Sam.
Sam Vaughn, who gave the best TED speech I have ever heard, and his mentor, Devone Boggan, are working to reduce violent crime. Shootings, to be specific.
It’s a hard sell where they live. Where they live, boys are conditioned to a certain I-dare-you posture before they get to middle school, where their goal shifts to “be the hardest cat out there.”
What does that look like? So many fist fights you can’t count them. So much machismo you can’t shake it. …
My husband Edward recently told me, in the kindest possible way, that he thinks sometimes I “go on” a bit. For instance, when people ask me how my book is coming, he thinks they’re looking for something simple, like “good.” When I say, “Well, I handed in a rewrite last week and the editors were happy with it so maybe I’m a month away from being finished,” he suspects that may be 23 more words than they wanted.
When I pressed him (“But they asked!”), he said it was probably different for everyone but that if he were me, he’d…
Agency is a favorite area of thought for me. Why wouldn’t it be? There may be no more appealing concept than that each of us has options in every moment to take a little bit of control back from the universe.
Got two great role models of personal agency for you to meet today.
- Jessica Jackson — law school mentor to Kim Kardashian West, partner of Van Jones in social justice and prison reform — has more moxie in her little finger than I have in my whole body. She was a 22 year-old high school drop out with a…
A memorable bit from this week’s podcast.
I was recently in a juicy conversation with a new friend named Lori about how she worked her way through a series of life-changing choices in her late 30s , starting with get married or break up.
Lori, who is now in her 50s working as a therapist and writing the follow up to her bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, said she discussed her relationship conundrum with many friends over many months and every one of them told her the same thing: marry him. …
I have discovered all kinds of new interests this year — puzzles, painting and drawing, hiking and podcasting, which has centered my work week around lively and often profound heart-to-hearts about what advice we should and should not be following, the search for a few universal truths we can count on (even in these most unsettled of times) and a deep dive on how change really happens, in society, across the globe and person by person.
In this time when our sense of mortality is being primed every damn morning with eye-popping numbers of people all around us infected, hospitalized…
I was talking to my friend Andy Laats about his wife, Liz, who died five years ago when their kids were 8, 10 and 12, and in trying to describe the amount of thought she put into parenting, he said, “Liz was a mom with a capital M.” Indeed, she was.
I myself had a mom with a capital M, and have since become one.
So what is this capital M work, then?
For my mother, as I suspect is true for all, the hardest work is when we are required to operate outside our comfort zones for the safety…
kelly corrigan
New York Times bestselling author, host of new podcast: Kelly Corrigan Wonders and PBS show: Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan
