“Beware the Ides of March.” A banger line we’ve been repeating for more than 400 years. Not because we collectively read Plutarch in our spare time, but because a playwright took a momentous event, zhuzhed it up, and the rest is history.  "Et tu, Brute?" also made up. No one knows Caesar's actual last words, but most accounts say he pulled his toga over his head and said nothing. Just the dizzying, devastating grief of a man murdered by someone he loved. I made that up, too.

TLDR: That "back at zero" feeling? It's lying to you. Everything you've lived, learned, survived, and outgrown is coming with you. You're not starting over, you're starting from experience. There's a difference. Use it.

Should creates an illusion of autonomy until we explore why we feel in conflict with it. This is where curiosity becomes powerful.

TL;DR: possibility is where life actually happens - make the choice. We often mistake running simulations for making decisions. We play out every what-if: What if it doesn’t work? What if I fail? What if I look silly? What if I can’t do it? You don’t decide your way forward by rehearsing outcomes. Clarity doesn’t come before the decision. It comes because of it. There’s a fork in the road most of us face again and again. One path is "what if." It feels responsible, and it giv

TL;DR: Too many goals = not much progress. Identify a lead goal. You want to launch that business. You want to run a marathon. You want to give a TED Talk. You want to learn French. And go to France. And travel more! All good goals. But here’s the deal: if you have multiple high-priority goals, you actually have zero. When we spread our energy across lots of life-changing ambitions, overwhelm sets in. We don’t know where to start, so we burn energy and time thinking about

TLDR: Some of my hardest seasons were full of no’s, and they’re the reason the good stuff could emerge. What do you feel when you’re told no? Failure? Rejection? An ending?   What if we thought about no a little differently? Not as something harsh or final, but as refinement. As clarity. As a path to yes. Every no brings something into sharper focus, even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when it’s not what we hoped for.   No removes noise. No creates edges. No makes space for de

TLDR: Create space to slow down; clarity before action.   The end of the year has a way of turning the volume up on everything.   More parties. More late nights and full calendars. More consumption.   When the world revs up, we have to make an effort to slow down. To make space.   As I’ve been preparing for a small group focused on reflection before the new year, I considered joy. What brings you joy? What excites you when you look at your day, your week, your month?   And in

There’s this whisper so many of us hear when we’re in transition.  You’ve never done this. How are you going to do this? Are you sure this is going to work? Maybe this was a mistake. New job? Starting over.  New relationship? Starting over.  New dream? Definitely starting over. But the truth is, you’re never starting from scratch. You’re starting from experience. Every misstep, success, and late-night “what now?”  is data you get to use this time around. You’re  not new; the

We’re wrapping up Spooky Season after four weeks of brilliant, fascinating guests, and this final conversation feels like the perfect way to end the series. This week's guest on Wait — What Do You Do Again? , is Dr. Mikki Brock. Mikki teaches and speaks widely on topics including demonology, witchcraft, and British history, and her research centers on questions of religious belief, gender, and identity in early modern Scotland. Calvinist Scotland was a world where witch tria

Dr. Mikki Brock  is a Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her research focuses on questions of religious belief, gender, and identity in early modern Scotland, with a particular interest in the histories of the supernatural. She teaches and speaks widely on topics including demonology, witchcraft, and British history. Originally from Texas, Dr. Brock earned her B.A. from the University of Kansas and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Univers

Every now and then, a guest says something that stays with me long after the recording. This week, it was Dr. Cailín Murray , an anthropologist at Ball State University who studies the intersection of folklore, belief, and the stories we tell about what haunts us.   “It’s not whether you believe in ghosts or not. We’re all made up of ghosts because we carry their DNA.”   Isn’t that great?!   So maybe, we’re all a little haunted, too.   Not by rattling chains or flickering lig

Dr. Cailín Murray was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Western Washington University in Bellingham, followed by a Master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Before joining the faculty at Ball State University, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Her fascination with ghosts and spirits began during graduate school while reading Karl Marx, and she has been actively researchi

Dr. Bernice Murphy is an Associate Professor in Popular Literature at Trinity College Dublin, where she specializes in American horror and Gothic fiction and film. She completed her PhD on Shirley Jackson at Trinity in 2003 and has since become a leading scholar on Jackson’s work, editing Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy  and serving as academic consultant on The Letters of Shirley Jackson  (Penguin Random House, 2021). Her research explores themes of place and

Shirley Jackson’s brilliant literature, monsters, and your scary neighbor. October invites us to play with fear. We pull the blanket to our chin or peek between our fingers, safely terrified by ghosts, vampires, and the things that go bump in the night. I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters and what they speak to in our larger society. But lately I've been thinking about the monsters hiding in shadows, but those just outside our front door. Because real horror rarely announ

Darkness falls across the land / The midnight hour is close at hand / Creatures crawl in search of blood / To terrorize y'alls...

Dr. Imani M. Cheers is a cultural curator, multimedia producer, and Associate Professor of Digital Storytelling at The George Washington...

Shannon Evans is not your typical Southerner. Known for her direct approach, she combines her storytelling abilities with her penchant...

The word empathy has been having a real moment recently, but it’s worth pausing on what it  means and how it’s different from sympathy. I...

JOHN DAVID GRAHAM is the founder and executive director of Good Samaritan Home, a non-profit social service agency in Ohio, offering...

Curiosity and the work of meeting each other across universes of our own making. When my kids were little, we loved Thomas the Train. One...