For 25+ years, one of my New York City rituals has been running or walking past the church quote board on 61st Street and Park Avenue. That board has been a spiritual compass, offering inspiration through pivotal moments—from post-9/11 New York to career shifts, to countless miles across Manhattan: my first NYC Marathon in 1995, and The Great New York…
Tag: motivation
May I Remember: A Journey Through Grief, Healing, and the Power of Retreat
The Fall, Then Falling Apart Since May 19, 2023, my life has transformed. I was in the Florida Keys, ready to race my ninth Keys 100 ultramarathon, running from Key Largo to Key West, when I learned my dad had fallen and was taken away in an ambulance. I withdrew from the race—one of my dad’s favorites, where he’d worked…
Divine Pause
What do we learn about ourselves in the time outs? On Sunday, September 8th, flying back to Florida from an event in DC, just as my plane was about to hit the runway in Fort Lauderdale, golden twilight illuminating the plane, we lifted back into the air, climbing beyond 10,000 feet. There was silence as passengers looked at one another,…
Ultra-Humanity
I heard a new broadcaster remark this week that it’s important right now that we “do not lose faith in humanity.” It was in reference to the 11 people that were gunned down at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. It brought me back to classrooms on college campuses, and how after our lock-down drills I would worry about the…
MONASTERY
3 months living with Benedictine and Trappist monks – what could go wrong? Years back, in the early-after 9/11 era, I lived with Roman Catholic monks at Benedictine and Trappist monasteries from Canada, to South Carolina, to Massachusetts, to California. I started off the journey with a few weeks at an Ashram in Pennsylvania and finished it at a Buddhist…
Life After College: Navigating the Road Ahead
You spent four or more years learning, studying, writing papers, taking tests, and achieving grades high enough to earn a college degree. Congratulations! But your journey is not over. In fact, now is when it really begins. After having professors motivate, encourage, and mentor you, now your fate is in your own hands. Next up is to navigate the world…
Mother’s Day: On Love & Loss
When I was younger, Mother’s Day and my birthday always blurred together with their being a few days apart. For my Bat Mitzvah, our Rabbi instructed me to write my haftorah speech about how my mother had impacted my life at that early age, and to pay reverence to all mothers. In retrospect, it was fitting, as my mother played…
Hustle, Hassle, and Positivity
If you are immersed in the daily hustle—a juggling act of being your best at work, home, and with your family—it’s likely that you have learned along the way to take a lot of deep breaths, laugh often, and continually reinvigorate your passion and purpose. When it comes to hustling, being on the right path is often what keeps you…
Priorities
Most of us tend to spend our days scrambling from one event to the next, be it work, meetings, or extracurricular events. We live in a time of slotting activities in and striving to accomplish our daily tasks. Although I attempt to let daily situations dictate my priories, whether it’s work, family, or play, often, the lines blur—is it more…
Hardwork, Hustle, and Grit
In life, we tend to see the finished product—a book, a presentation, a company that is successful, a car driving along on the road, runners crossing the finish line of a race. Unless it is your book, company, creation, or race, one rarely glimpses the effort or intensity of an endeavor. As a society, we are not privy to the…