Several months ago while visiting my ninety-eight-year-old grandmother, I knelt down next to her chair and looked her in the eyes.
“Grandma,” I said with mock seriousness, “I think you’re finally getting old.”
She laughed. “Well, yes, I think I finally am!”
In some ways, I wasn’t kidding. My grandmother has always been active and fit, gleefully turning a somersault for her five-year-old great-grandson when she was seventy-five. Taking care of “the old …
The answer is yes and they do it by building resilience. University of North Carolina professor Barbara Fredrickson has spent the past two decades looking into why we have positive emotions and what we do with them. She even has her own term for her work: positivity.
To quote an old commercial, “Why ask ‘why’?” when it comes to positive emotions? Shouldn’t we just enjoy them while they’re around? Sure, but …
I’ve been talking via email with my stepsister, Lori, whose teenage daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome. Our online conversation was mostly about the highs and lows of raising her neuro-diverse daughter and she shared with me many of the gifts that come along with having a special needs child.
Then, one day, this was the message in my inbox: “Today is a day in the trenches! It’s a battle and I’m bawling …
I worked with Joe over a year ago and now he returned to see me with a new problem. He had just been diagnosed with a rare degenerative disorder that would eventually rob him of the use of his limbs as his muscles weakened over time. Joe wanted to talk about how he could prepare himself for this decline.
Joe is in his sixties and has worked in high tech for …
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