A barrage of minor stressors had left me tightly wound by last Friday. I needed to unwind. But instead of automatically reaching for my iPad, I opted for an old-fashioned kind of quiet. I picked up a memoir I had abandoned months ago and finally started reading again....
Last weekend, I decided it was time for some spring cleaning. Not the overly ambitious “empty every closet in the house” kind of cleaning. Just a broad-stroke reset after a long winter. I cleared a stack of papers that had been quietly growing on my desk and organized...
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent van Gogh Energy changes as you get older. It simply does. Do you remember when you used to start your night at 9:00 PM? You’d head to a café, order an espresso and pull a focused...
When I was finishing my dissertation, I didn’t use meditation to get through it — but I truly wish I had. Back then, I thought meditation was something reserved for yogis on mountaintops, not for an over-caffeinated, middle-aged grad student buried under stacks of...
A small confession: when I was writing my own dissertation, I lost one entire month of August to a heady combination of over-ripe peaches, second-rate mystery novels and a home-organization project that resulted in exactly zero new pages written. If you’ve just looked...
Let’s be honest: perfectionism is exhausting. Most graduate students believe the introductory chapter of their dissertation must be flawless before moving forward with their draft. They imagine that if Chapter One isn’t completely solid, the whole dissertation will...
