Happy Memorial Day - and Victoria Day, to my Canadian readers.

I must confess, I’m not an Excel user. Whenever Charlotte sends me a spread sheet, I cringe. But recently, (while planning my first catering job, to be exact), I discovered that a spread sheet was the way to go. So I’ve started to learn how to use one - only baby steps, but at least I’m not cringing any more. And frankly, it’s made part of my life easier.

So what new knowledge or skill would make some part of your life easier? Maybe it’s learning all the functions of your cell phone or PDA. Maybe it’s a new computer program or how to use your food processor. The time and energy you invest in learning that skill will save you time and energy for the rest of your life.

P.S. Did you know there are search engines that donate money to charity with every search you perform? And it costs you nothing. They get revenue from the ads on their sites and donate anywhere from 50% to all of the money they make to charity. For a list of the top 15 charity search engines, check out www.doshdosh.com/13-charity-search-engines-that-help-you-give-money-to-charity-for-free.

What a week–and it’s only Monday.

 My daughter is struggling with some health issues, my favorite uncle just died, my husband’s work schedule has changed and is requiring a lot of adjustment, and my teleclasses are successful beyond my wildest imagination (Which is great but requires a lot of work).

So feeling somewhat stressed by all this, I called my mother. Who else do we reach out to? After talking about my own issues for about half an hour, I finally got around to asking about her. She’d had cataract surgery that morning–and I’d forgotten!

No guilt trip though, at least not from her. Instead she supported me, listened, respected, and reminded me of my own strength and abilities.

My mother (and her two sisters) are Lyndens, and I’m named for the Lyndens:  Lynn. All three women are incredibly strong matriarchs, as was my grandmother. These are the kinds of women who hold families together, who are the heart and soul and core and foundation of their families. No offense to my father or my uncles, all of whom were/are loving and caring and hard-working, but without the Lynden women, their lives would have been empty and formless. Well, that last may have been a bit too strong, but it has always been obvious who the heads of the families were–the Lynden women.

I once asked my mother what it was like to have sisters (I have a younger brother, and although we love each other, we are not close) and she said “It just is.” I’ve watched them for years as they supported, and continue to support, each other through births, marriages, deaths, ill health, joy and sorrow. They are scattered across the continent thousands of miles away from each other, and yet they are connected in an amazing way. I envy them their sisterhood.

I am proud to be part of such a family. It gives me something to live up to; something to aim for, those three amazing women.  

Here’s the runner up in the voting for your favorite Weekly Challenger from the last five years:

The Week of Possibilities (from September, 2006)

My husband and I have declared this summer to be “The Summer of Possibilities.” What might we do, where might we go, how might we change our lives to make them more of what we want them to be? Anything is up for consideration. The knee-jerk “We can’t do that!” response is not allowed. To remind us of that, I made a sign for our kitchen bulletin board that says, “Let’s move to Mars and start a hydrogen farm.”

And what’s come up has been fascinating. We haven’t made any decisions, but we are discovering that things we once thought were vitally important aren’t. Time together is more valuable than money. A quiet evening on our back balcony is as wonderful as a luxury vacation, if not more so. (No reservations, no packing, no traveling, no security issues, and we can get there any time we want.)

I invite you to join us and turn this week into “The Week of Possibilities.” If anything were possible, what changes would you make in your life? How would you recreate your life to honor your values and your dreams more fully?

And hey, if you want to keep going beyond one week - go for it!

Thanks for your vote, but even more, thank you for welcoming me into your life.

One of my favorite writing instructors (and author), is Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, and Long Quiet Highway, just to name a couple of her books. Here’s a quote from her:

“Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important.”

So this week, pay attention to the false urgencies in your life - the unimportant things that take on the face of life-or-death importance. What happens when you remove that sense of emergency and face things calmly and rationally?

It’s a cool, rainy day here in Colorado, the kind that the Irish and Scottish would call “soft.” And it’s my writing day–well, writing morning, actually. So I snuggled down into bed, pulled the covers up under my chin, closed my eyes and went to work.

Yup. I worked. As I lay there, all warm and cozy, I went over what I was going to write, the topics, the transitions, the general concepts. (They refine themselves when I sit down at the computer.) I thought about how things were going to fit together. I reminded myself “Don’t get it good; just get it down. Writing is really rewriting,”  so I wouldn’t get caught up in perfectionism. About 45 minutes later, I got up, with a clear picture in my mind of what I was going to write.

I have a writing outfit–a T-shirt from the Napa Valley Writers Unlimited that says “Will Write for Wine and pink bunny slippers–that I wear onlywhen writing, and I put that on. I made a pot of my special “writing” coffee, and ate a quick breakfast while re-reading what I’d previously written. And then I settled down to write.

And because of those 45 minutes of prep; because of the ritual I have (the outfit, the coffee, the routine), I was able to get right to work. Everything flowed easily. I cranked out 12 single-spaced pages in about 3 hours. And called it a day–for writing anyway .

For me, the keys to writing successfully are:

• Know what you want to say before you sit down to say it (sounds like common sense, but a lot of people expect it to come after they sit down to write. That’s when you get blank-screen freeze-up.)
• Don’t get it good, just get it down. Expect to rewrite. Plan to rewrite.
• Set aside a good chunk of time on a regular basis (I write Mondays first thing in the morning, Wednesdays right after yoga, and every other Thursday morning), and hold that time sacred. Block it out for writing. Don’t schedule anything else. Make sure this time is your best creative, high energy time. Do
• Have a ritual or routine that you use, every single time, to tell yourself that this is your writing time. This gets your creative juices flowing before you hit the computer.
• If possible, write in a different place from where you do your other work. Laptops are great for this.
• Turn off all distractions–e-mail especially.
• Don’t do anything except write during your writing time.

I’d think this pretty much applies to any kind of creative endeavor: music, painting, cooking, whatever. So if you’re stuck or blocked or can’t seem to get going, you might give this a try.