While Mary Beth and I were writing our fourth book in the Living Brave series, Finishing Strong…Stories of Women Becoming, a certain word kept coming up during the interviews with the women we interviewed: enough. When are you enough?

The answers surprised us and equally confirmed our own feelings of becoming enough. We discovered most young women struggle with feeling enough, Especially before reaching the age of 50. After 50 women wrote they began to understand that enough is not based on having or doing more or being perfect. It was accepting where they had landed in life, no matter the previous circumstances. It was good enough. 

It must be maturity coming over me, but when I hear the words ‘one moment please’ it doesn’t bother me. It used to irritate me. Having to wait and feeling dismissed by 3 words. Didn’t they know I didn’t have an extra moment to wait? Why did they bother to answer if I was going to wait anyway? And on and on I thought while waiting. What a self-important pill I was. And now, I’m thrilled to hear a human’s voice on the line. It gives me time to prepare myself even better with my question or directive or it becomes a reminder to breathe. So many of us are not breathing enough these days. 

I have come to know that life still happens in the moments while we are waiting. Take one moment please. Review, remember, and breathe. 

Jackie Ulmer, business consultant and social media expert sent this to her group. Simple, fun and poignant!  “Life is best consumed as an analogy, in my opinion. Recently, on Clubhouse I heard this analogy about life and business.

​We should all have a 'Wishbone'. That’s essentially our bucket list. Write it down, develop it and be intentional with it.

To best navigate life, it’s important that we also have a 'Funnybone', and that’s to remember to keep a sense of humor about the good and the bad that life deals us.  

I was born to family of resilient women. My grandmother, Romana Villaverde, a Yaqui Indian from the mountains of Hermosillo Mexico, survived with her family eating high desert plants and drinking milk from a goat. Married as a teenager, widowed in her thirties with four children, she lived to be 94. At 92, her doctor recommended she stop smoking. She asked why.

​My mother Maria lived just short of her 92nd birthday. She was courageous, resilient and a loving force to be reckoned with. She was unstoppable when she made up her mind. I think she made up her mind the day she was born under harsh, poverty-stricken circumstances. She remained persistent and resilient throughout her entire life. She mastered ‘bouncing back.’ 

Love is a funny emotion. You can feel it, see it, want it, give it, hate it and be grateful for it. You can wish you were in love or wish you could stop loving someone because you know it’s time to stop. Or you can wish you still loved someone because it would be the wise thing to do. 
Love is magical and confusing. It’s just not the same for everyone. 

For several years I have written a yearly February article on love. And three years ago, Mary Beth and I wrote a book about it, Living Brave…In Love, Stories of Intimacy Lost and Found.  It's a great collection of love stories and was an eye-opener for both of us…we thought we knew much about love!  Worth the read. Especially the novelette in the center of the book, The Two Night Stand. Another confusing story of being loved, losing love, finding love, absolving love.  

I read an article in The Epoch Times, by Joshua Becker in the Mind & Body Section: ‘You Can’t Quite Buy Happiness, but Almost. Researchers have found there are specific ways to spend your money if you want to increase happiness.’ I would love to share the entire piece with you, but I can’t (it’s plagiarism). But instead, will present the heart of the article. I found it relevant to beginning a new year with the question, can we buy happiness?
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I’ve often said, money can’t buy happiness, but money can give us choices. I have struggled financially in my life where a bit of money would have presented better choices and put a happy smile on my face, but instead it planted seeds for happier times to come as well as an appreciation of the money when it came. 

Most Pluma clients know her as Samantha. Her official name is Ibtisam Nisan. She was born in Iraq thirty-nine years ago. At the age of nine, along with her mother and four siblings, they escaped from Iraq and the warfare of Saddam Hussein.

Along with hundreds of others, Samantha’s family walked for several days until they reached Turkey. While the people walked, many carrying their children and whatever belongings they could hold, American planes dropped food and water to keep them alive. She remembers little about this walk, except they were frightened, cold, wet from rain and they were exhausted and their mother kept them moving forward. 

​Celebrating Thanksgiving this year will be a new experience for most of us. Our lives have taken a detour and reconstructing and reassembling our lives has become a priority as we move toward the end of this year. But we are seeing and experiencing some sense of a new version of normality evolving and we will find our rhythm once again. As humans, we depend on inspiration, routines and relationships, not only to survive but to thrive.  Our history has left a footprint of our comebacks, rebirths and amazing successes through our customs and relations. And through it all, a sense of grace eventually arrives, and we will once again enjoy the beauty of gathering in our lives. 

Recently I came across the newest data on longevity. Who lives longer? What factors effect longevity? The most interesting research I found on longevity came from Julianne Holt-Lunstad a BYU professor of Psychology. Here is a snippet of her research interests: “There is now robust evidence of the protective effects of social relationships both on morbidity and on mortality, with a magnitude of effect comparable with many well-established risk factors such as smoking cessation and obesity. My program of research examines the influence of both the quantity and the quality of social relationships on long-term health and on risk for mortality, and the biological pathways (e.g., cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, genetic) by which such associations may occur. I also consider the potentially detrimental influence of negativity in close relationships (e.g., ambivalence, marital distress). My studies have examined social relationships at a network level, among married couples, in mother-and-infant relationships, and within friendships.” 

I must confess as optimistic as I am about life in general and the future of our world, these past months have been a bit challenging keeping the light of hope alive daily.
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Each morning I review my gratitude list and add a few more for good measure. Some days I had to stretch a bit until I found that ray of hope on which to build. 
Then, one morning, after skyping with my son and grandson Finn, I realized I was looking too hard and in all the wrong places. Hope is everywhere around us. It is especially in the young ones who surround us.