I don't have children, but I have 17 nieces and nephews, and they more than make up for anything that I can do. I have a stepdaughter, and I adore her to pieces, and I think about adoption. There are so many kids at different ages and stages that nee...
Our cultural roots are the most ancient in the world. The spiritual concepts of our Ancestors gave birth to religious thought African people believe in the oneness of the African family through sacred time, which unites the past, the present and the ...
We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little - my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colone...
When you are about to die a montage of your family and friends fast forwards until your mind flashes quickly to the person you love and what you last said to them. If it was loving, you die in peace. Life was and always will be about love.
As a Naval officer, I've been all over the world, and one of the foundational lessons I learned was that parents everywhere would like to raise their children to a higher standard of living in a peaceful environment. That's a universal goal for famil...
I hope somebody cares because I sure don't. I sure don't. Not anymore. I'm ashamed to go around my family. I'm too embarrassed to confide in my friends. Outside of work I don't have a life.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfo...
Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.
In Hawaii, we go to this wonderful place, all families. My wife and I go directly from breakfast to a beach chair where we read all day. My daughter goes from water to pool to running around with friends she meets, some of whom are regulars there.
Perhaps a sense of possessing needs to come before a sense of genuine sharing. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experience what it means to possess themselves, their own sens...
As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We’re not specially courageous, we’re just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would ar...
The Bush tax cuts should be extended permanently for families with annual incomes of less than $250,000 and should be phased out slowly for those making more than that. Raising taxes on anyone now, when the economic recovery is so fragile, would be a...
My head is in a world of hurt. My apartment is trashed. At the end of today, I could either be dating the girl who saves my family’s future or is going to be the ending of it. When did life get so damn complicated?
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future." -Nelson Mandela
The most blatant forms of denialism are rarely malevolent; they combine decency, a fear of change, and the misguided desire to do good - for our health, our families, and the world. That is why so many physicians dismiss the idea that a patient's rac...
I think we live in a world where the most important thing is daily life: sharing a space with your family, making meals, being with your people. It's not only the idea of privacy, it's the beauty of the moment, at a time in the world when everything ...
I get a little myopic in the act of doing any writing. I think I'm not as interested or not as able to write about balance, because I think there's something I want to try to get at. I'm trying to get at something about the experience of growing up o...
My personal missteps - how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America...
When I was 5 and my sister was 3, we went on a family trip, and she ate cheese off the floor at an airport. My mother, a germaphobe, got very upset. My sister, of course, got a stomach virus, and ever since then, I have an aversion to cheese.
The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I dep...
