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  You get up in front of a group. All eyes are on you. You are about to speak and suddenly laughter erupts. You look down and realize you are buck naked. You shriek and run off the stage.  You just had a common recurring nightmare about humiliation when performing. To take it a step further, some therapists believe this common nightmare is also about guilt and inferiority, according to a piece in HuffPost, “What it Means When You Dream About Being Naked in Public: It’s all about keeping your emotions in check” by Sarah DiGiulio, Feb. 23, 2017.  What about...

Piv-ot. It’s the most overused term of the pandemic era and a concept that has bubbled to the surface as crucial to surviving. It’s about shifting gears, if you will, from a job you may have been in for years or decades, for which there is less need now, to one that offers greater demand of your time and services—and for which you are wildly appreciated. Kudos to all those restauranteurs who can’t serve diners inside but knew they could set up outside spaces in which they could feed them safely or become caterers and take-out food shop owners. Some...

Typically, when Barbara and her beau drive in the car together, the conversation is sanguine and pleasant. Until one day recently.  As they drove to the University at Albany, SUNY, campus, in a snowstorm for one of them to get the coronavirus vaccine (the other had already done so), another storm began to brew in their car.  With her beau at the wheel, Barbara grew concerned about road conditions as she noticed that the two-lane highway merged into one lane and few snowplow trucks were working.  It was at this point that the conversation took a nasty turn. It happened...

We talked in our last blog about the importance of gathering around the family dinner table. This blog will take a metaphorical look at “taking our seats at the table” whether siblings in our families, or as citizens in our communities and in the world. We spend a great deal of time discussing people we admire-- writers, medical professionals, scientists, architects, chefs, designers, performers, educators, politicians and so on. Some are notable because they took their seat at the table to produce works, ideas, a movement, invention, something heroic or political at just the right moment in our culture and...

The Dinner Table: Resetting Our Traditions Among the activities we’ve come to miss most during the year of the pandemic has been gathering around the dinner table with friends and family. If we have a spouse or partner, which Barbara does, she has someone with whom she can converse, share the meal and make eye contact. She certainly doesn’t take this for granted. But early on during the pandemic, meal after meal became so routine that they broke their long-standing habit of not eating in front of the TV. They became adept at juggling plates on their laps while watching...