I think I need to start this entry with a sincere apology that I have not updated my giving all week. This time of year demands all of my attention at school with the added pressure of grad school—needless to say I am a little behind is all of it right now! I have been giving though and this is how it went:

When giving is this fun, it hardly feels like giving at all; it makes me feel like I am taking more than I give but I think that might be the point of this whole challenge!

Although I don’t want my giving to become robotic or planned weeks in advance, there is a certain amount of planning that enables me to give in ways that I can’t if I just left it all to chance.

As my giving challenge continues, I find myself going back to my perfectionist roots. When a giving opportunity doesn’t just fall into my lap, I have to think about what I can give and that makes me wonder if I am going about this the wrong way

I love that my giving is helping to remind me that I have knowledge and talents that other people value. In our busy world, it’s easy to feel like you are an island trying to stay afloat in a sea of others doing the same. I think we have a tendency to take our daily interactions with others for granted and not see how much we value others, and how much others value us.

Today was my first day of the 29 Days of Giving and I thought I had a plan this morning. I was all ready to give this thing to a colleague and then I forgot it at home—it must not have been in the stars! So I went in and started the day and didn’t really think about what I was going to give because I was far too busy to even contemplate it.

In my quest for tasks that will help me remember that I have enough, that I am enough, I came across an article in one of my favourite magazines about how giving to others without expectation can reconnect us with our world.

If I said that someone I knew left her full-time job, sold the company she had nurtured since 1994, and planned to move to the other side of the world to follow her dream, how would you think she felt? My initial thought was nervous, and probably excited. Laurie Brinklow is the person diving into this new adventure, and in speaking with her I realized that nerves do not appear to enter into the picture.

I dreamt that I was flying. I rarely have flying dreams, and this one appeared approximately three days after I consciously pondered my lack of experience with this classic archetype.
It was dusk, a common setting for my chimera, and I was flying over top of a paved runway littered with all kinds of absurd obstacles—mounds [...]

Three years ago, I came home from work one day to discover that my life was about to change forever. My husband of six years informed me that he wanted a divorce. I had thought we were planning for children; clearly we had different goals for our marriage! I was completely stripped of everything I [...]