Quick Guide to Reassessment

Year-End close-out and reconciliation, whatever you call your reassessment, now it a good time to check your status, chart your course, move along...

1) Know where you are

a. Location
b. Occupation
c. Education
d. Relationships

2) Know where you want to be

a. Location
b. Occupation
c. Education
d. Relationships

3) Steps to move from one place to the other

a. 3 steps for a
b. 3 steps for b
c. 3 steps for c
d. 3 steps for d

4) Timeline

a. Wishful timeline
b. Realistic timeline

Celebrate the past year for progress made, good bye 2010. Celebrate the future year for the progress to come, hello 2011.

Happy Birthday Baby Boy

Twenty-nine years ago today, I showed up for the appointment made to surgically remove my baby from my womb. It was a trauma: not the birth because he wasn’t birthed but the surgical removal of the infant for a variety of dubious reasons which were given for the convenience of the doctor’s schedule during the holiday season.

Hopeful that my experience was rare and that most doctors aren’t as hard-hearted, I didn’t often share my experience with others. Frankly, I was ashamed of it. I felt violated. I felt stupid and soon after recognized my gullibility, I had acquiesced and placed my child in jeopardy.

Mother’s guilt for bad decisions can be overwhelming but there is a point where you can only be responsible for decision based on the information given at the time. My guts said the doctor was telling me some information but not all. But why would as 18-year-old girl know better than a doctor?

The doctor said that I was unable to birth. He said the baby was too late. He said the baby was too big. He said the baby would die inside of me if I didn’t do what he said to do.

The inner knowledge, woman-wisdom I’ve come to call it, said the baby wasn’t ready. If he was ready to be born, he’d come. I didn’t trust myself. I was afraid. I allowed a doctor to schedule the surgery.

The arrival was disastrous with the anesthesiologist telling me I didn’t feel anything. I was chemically paralyzed but not anesthetized. I felt everything. It wasn’t until I was being wheeled into recovery that I actually went numb.

Numb and dumb in the recovery room, I cried. They took my baby away to the nursery. My baby was jaundiced, a sign of premature birth. I was drugged & out of it until they released us on the morning of the 25th; sent home with my abdomen stapled together, a prescription in hand and a bag of disposable diapers. “Merry Christmas,” they said.

Many years later, I see the beginning was a foreshadowing of things to come. But truth be told, the doctor was a liar. I was the recipient of many lies as the drama based on bad information unfolded.

In this particular case I affirm that I birthed much larger babies than my first and for whatever reason they take longer choosing their arrival date. A wise midwife told me: Babies come when they come; their time not by scheduling on a calendar.

So I light a candle each holiday season: a prayer for pregnant women, that only the truth will fill their ears.

Book Review: Earthing

Title: Earthing: The most important health discovery ever?
Authors: Clinton Ober, Stephen Sinatra, MD, Martin Zucker
Publisher: Basic Health Publications, Inc
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59120-283-7
Price: $18.95

This book came to me as a surprise. I love surprises. Even more of a surprise was the contents which made so much sense. In regular language the authors explain why we have so many health problems and the simple solution to many, if not all of them.

Wish you felt better? Interested in small changes that make a huge difference in your health? This should be the next book you read.

The 259 page book is sectioned into four parts: Part One: Why we are unhealthy – the missing link; Part Two: Personal discoveries; Part Three: Connecting with Science; Part Four: Earthing Chronicles.

The one thing that I liked about the book was that everything, even the complicated scientific stuff was put in a way that was easy to understand. The explanations are essential so the reader doesn’t think that this is just made up. Time and time again, in anecdotal trials then in clinical trials the same results played out the same: getting grounded restores a better healthy balance to the body.

Grounded is just that grounded to the earth, like an electrical appliance, only humans need to reconnect with our Planet. There are several ways of reconnected, each is explained in the book but it is a simple as walking barefoot on the beach or in your garden.

Older people suffer from a variety of ailments but most are accompanied by inflammation. The trials and the photos show that earthing or grounding help relieve much of the inflammation in a short period of time. The pain relief when the inflammation subsides is testimony enough for the clients/patients to want to continue to use the earthing apparatus or to continue to connect to the Planet regularly.

The easiest way to connect and become grounded while continuing to have a busy life, is to use the products developed by one of the authors, placing grounding sheets on your bed is all you must do. The authors declare, you won’t have to wait for results, you’ll feel better after the first night.

Book Review: The Kennedy Detail

Title: The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents break their silence
Author: Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin
Genre: History
Publication Date: 2010
Publisher: Gallery Books, NY
ISBN 978-1-4391-9296-2
Price: $28.00

Breaking of more than four decades of silence, the Secret Service Agent turned tell-all author attracts historians and Kennedy-fans with his compilation of government documents, agent stories and personal account of November 22, 1963. This is a story that begged to be told.

Agent stories place the characters in place and time. The men served their country not for the low wages but for inner reasons. Their lives were inextricably intertwined with the First Family, spending more time with Caroline and Jon than their own children. Their wives and children were bonded together in an effort to make up for the time their husbands were away. The agent life style deprived them of regular meals, regular sleep and perhaps, taxed their inner resources to a point that led to their failure of duty, it certainly left an opening for a mad-man to shot the president and alter the course of the country forever.

What draws many people to the story of the assignation of President John F Kennedy is the country’s grief that continues to this day. Children not yet born can identify the country’s optimism in the early 1960s: America had faced off with the Reds and won; we had launched machines into space; we were able to claim our greatest and dream of better things to come. The dreams were dashed that infamous Day in Dallas. American ideals best stated in JFK’s notable speech: Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country, were withdrawn into a societal caution and grief.

Jerry Blaine was there through the all the events that lead up to the assassination, the funeral and afterwards. While many of the other agents left the secret service feeling that they had failed, Jerry Blaine continued his career until retirement. His position within the organization allowed him to come forward at this time to tell the story of six seconds that changed the country forever.

The book is written in four sections: The Men, The Job, That Day, and Our Lives which fills in the picture of the president’s life in the early 1960s and the small intimate detail of agents who sole job it is to protect the president from harm. The Secret Service learned a lot in November 1963 that has benefited subsequent presidents and kept our Commander in Chief safe from madmen.

Readers will find new details to fill in the how and the why of the Kennedy assassination. The agent's personal stories create memorable perspective of a national tragedy.

Estimate versus Guess

As our culture changes at an even increasing rate of speed, it becomes more important to instill in the younger generations basic facts about honesty, logic, integrity. The ways we as a society convey our ideas, using ever increasing acronyms and misspellings for the sake of brevity (lol), remain problematic. The results range somewhere between complete miscommunication and utter global disaster.

The solution may be instilling in our younger generations a better grasp of language or at least a standard for the language we use.

Do you know the difference between an estimate and a guess?

Most people would say “yes”, but for clarity's sake please read on…

A group sits in a conference room, a long table in the middle with chairs around.

Ms. L: I want you to give me estimates but I don’t want you to guess.

Mr. A: Okay

Ms. L: Please let me give you an example of an estimate. Take this table for example: based on your ability to see the table and your proximity to the table and your experience with different sized tables, you would be able to estimate the length of this table.

Mr. A: Approximately.

Ms. L: Yes.

Mr. A: Well, it’s more than six feet but less than 10, I’ll guess, 8 and a half feet.

Ms. L: Actually, that’s an estimate, because you looked at it and reasoned it out. I happen to know that this table is 8 feet long, so your estimate was very close to correct. But if you had said anything between 6 and 10 feet, that too would be correct because you are estimating.

Mr. A: Okay, great!

Ms. L: But if I asked you how long my dining room table is at home, you would have to guess. You haven’t been to my house to see the table. I might not even have a dining room table. So for you to answer, that would be a guess.

Mr. A: I understand.

Ms. L: Great. Are you ready to proceed?

Mr. A: I guess.

Ms. L: cries….

Agreement of language is essential for good communication. If you aren’t sure what something means, ask. Language is fluid. Words have a variety of definitions. If you understand the language but you don’t understand the message, ask: what do you mean by that? What’s the point?