For weeks, I was convinced I had found the perfect office.

The funny thing is, the solution appeared only after I stopped trying to make that one work.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, my mind wants to solve everything at once.

What usually helps is something much smaller.

For most of my life, I thought home was a place.

The older I get, the more I wonder if it's something we carry with us.

My husband and I have a phrase we use when one of us is having a rough day:

"Don't Frog my Toad."

One of my favorite rituals with my husband takes only a few minutes and costs absolutely nothing.

We call it the gratitude game.

I spent years believing that being called weird meant I didn't belong.

It took me much longer to realize those two things were never the same.

For years, I spent more energy imagining the habits I should have than practicing the ones I could actually sustain.

It turns out those are two very different things.

Four times a year, my friend and I meet halfway between Tucson and Phoenix to mark the changing seasons.

During one of those lunches, she shared a sentence that completely changed the way I think about discipline.

I used to think creating space required a free afternoon, a lighter schedule, or a week away.

What surprised me was where I actually started finding it.

I used to call myself a chameleon.

For years, I thought that ability to blend in anywhere was one of my greatest strengths.

A mentor told me a story years ago about buffalo, cows, and an approaching storm.

I've been carrying it with me ever since.

Have you ever felt secretly relieved to be sick?

Not because you enjoyed feeling awful, but because for once there was nothing you were supposed to do.

Different person.

Same ending.

It wasn't until I learned a new way of looking at relationships that I began to understand why I kept finding myself in the same story.

For years, I only got trims.

Then one afternoon, I sat in a salon chair and asked for something different.

What do we actually mean when we talk about a life well lived? Years ago, my father compared me to my aunt Barby and meant it as an insult. It turned out he was pointing to something I admired all along.

Sometimes a single sentence overheard in an ordinary moment keeps tumbling through your mind long after you've walked away.

The color wasn't wrong. It just wasn't quite me.

I spent a surprising amount of time trying to define something that had already named itself.

The picture was adorable. The only problem was that it wasn't a mule.