It also really helps when the pep talk comes from a straight talking, adorable kid who goes by the name, Kid President!

Gratitude List / 2 minutes of appreciation: Kids are so darn cute. They make you smile in so many ways. To the way they view the world, the way they giggle, their honesty about things that we as adults learn to hide and repress, and their total openness and innocence and ignorance of all the should's that govern social interactions. I also love their resilience and puzzlement of how seriously we take everything and am reminded always to lighten up around them. They are so endlessly entertaining to watch, and so fun to interact with. There are so many times that they make some comment that makes you totally bust a gut. Also because I work with both kids and adults, I am amazed at the rapidness of the changes kids make when they are shown a different way. There is no clinging or not wanting to let go of something that is not working. There is less "crustiness" in the brain. One of my little clients' littler sister insisted on sitting in on our session today and while I was doing a process called Navel Radiation on her brother, she came up to him and covered his eyes and said, "Pink-a-boo!" Of course this little one is obsessed with pink so naturally, "peek a boo " is "pink a boo". Her brother and I were giggling as she did it over and over again.

Gratitude List / 2 minutes of appreciation: Getting your prayers answered/synchronicity - In this ambitious city, in this time of the world wide web, it's so easy to fill up your time with all kinds of things both good and not so fun, which gives the illusion that you are accomplishing a lot and making a difference in the world. But I have learned that frenetic activity is not always a sign of growth or progress and sometimes it can lead to burnout because it's work done for the wrong reasons, or you're on the path you think you should want, rather than what you truly want. I am guilty of being the hamster on the wheel, huffing and puffing and sweating away while staying immobile. Only since I have become more quiet and have started paying attention to what brings me a feeling of being alive at the end or what I feel called to go to intuitively(without knowing why) do I understand the magic that is all around us always course correcting us and putting us back on the path to what we really want, if I have the eyes to see it and ears to hear it. This evening was an example of that--seeing some posting in a random FB post, and feeling like, I need to go to that even though I don't know anything about it--finishing my work on time and just going without thinking about it, has reminded me of a request I made just a few days ago, about my next steps and then boom. There it was. It seems you pretty much always get what you ask for, and if you are not getting what you want, then you have to either let it go, ask for something else, or look into the way that you are asking. And trust. Trust that there is a larger order to things, that you are an important and indelible part of the whole and you are never forgotten.

I remember the first time the concept of the internet was introduced to me. I went to a school with two magnet programs. One for math and science and one for writing and communication arts(the one I was in). The science and magnet kids were introduced to it first, and apparently one of them figured out how to hack into some credit card company's data base and stole all kinds of money and ran away from home. He was found, arrested, and then put on some kind of list that will follow him and pop up on his record for the rest of his life....I don't know if this is the truth or an urban myth that was spread at our school, but the internet was this vast, amorphous thing "out there" that was supposed to connect us, but it was kind of weird and sci-fi. We all got our netscape account and the go-to search engine at the time was Lycos. When I went to college it was still this new fangled thing that was still not too commonplace---it was novel to be able to talk to my friend who was studying abroad in England or Ohio, but I was also still writing them letters(Imagine!). Now it governs almost every aspect of our lives from paying bills to, communicating, to organizing events, running businesses, entertaining ourselves, finding our mates, making friends with people we may never meet in the flesh, and learning about anything and everything you are curious about.
There will be a day in the future where I will be telling my kids about the days when we didn't have internet and they will look at me in wonder as if I was living in a cave with my knuckles dragging on the ground. I am so thankful for this thing that connects us and allows me to see my niece's face in real time even though she is hours away.