by Barry Phegan | Mar 31, 2020 | Living Life, Social comment
Homeschooling brings enthusiasm and commitment. Job losses depress more than income. Finding pleasure in simple things. Homeschooling Surprise — Engagement Brings Commitment Across the nation, parents of school-age children just finished their second week of...
by Barry Phegan | Mar 20, 2020 | Aging, Living Life, Social comment
Thursday, 3/12/2020 — Ambivalence Just one week ago, I flew from San Francisco airport to Seattle airport, then on to Wenatchee, WA, where my daughter and two grandchildren live. I’d waffled for days, “Should I go? What is the risk? If I don’t go now would...
by Barry Phegan | Feb 29, 2020 | Aging, Living Life, Social comment, Uncategorized
Loneliness is a national epidemic and it’s killing us. Social isolation is more lethal than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases inflammation, heart disease, dementia, and death rates. It’s linked to our opioid epidemic and soaring suicide rates. Despite...
by Barry Phegan | Feb 12, 2020 | Aging, Living Life, Social comment
A friend loaned me her copy of Gratitude (Knopf, 2019) by Oliver Sacks. Its spare 40 pages hold four beautiful little essays, each a memory or reflection written by Sacks in the closing years and months of his life. Though each essay yields many...
by Barry Phegan | Oct 7, 2019 | Aging, Living Life, Social comment
Man Plans, God Laughs. While life is largely a self-fulfilling-prophesy — we get what we expect — unmet expectations can be devastating. Even little ones can spoil our day. Having expectations is human. They come with our imagination. We can’t let go of...
by Barry Phegan | Sep 18, 2019 | Social comment
(Spoiler alert — Answer at the end.) Environment — Who gives you the right: To treat nature and our earth as consumable resources – or as a dump? To slice off mountaintops, build reservoirs of poison, and walk away as if you did nothing? To clear-cut forests,...
