When Shan Mussulman’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in May 2012, he held the vision of her as being healthy and cancer-free. It wasn’t easy. None of her doctors believed the disease could be cured and neither did she, but four months after Shan started her on a comprehensive health strategy, the cancer was gone. Shan is now dedicated…
What does the concept of “home” really mean to us? Does it mainly refer to a place that gives us a feeling of utmost security in our surroundings? And, whatever it might mean, as we age, is it possible to transfer our sense of home to another spot on the map? In my mother’s case, circumstances are forcing her to…
Over the years I have known people who participated in weekend workshops with popular, charismatic self-help gurus whose message, when you boiled down the rhetoric, videos, and promotional literature, was pretty simple: Just do it! They encouraged participants to leave the unhappy relationship, declutter their minds and homes, make that positive change in their lives, and become the people they…
My husband and I have an infuriating problem when we need to leave the house together. We play a strange, relay-race game with time, but rarely do we find time for doing nothing. He’ll be ready to go, for example, but I’ll still need to find my shoes or brush my teeth. So he gets on his computer. I appear…
Donald Judd (1928-1994) was one of the founders of Minimal art, a movement in which art was stripped down to pure form and proportion, no longer representing anything at all, but simply existing as an elegantly conceived, often geometrically simple object. Judd lived his art, designing geometric furniture and pure living spaces for himself and his family, filtering out all…
I proposed, and the next week we eloped, charging forward as man and wife. After 14 months of courtship, I thought I knew everything about her. But one evening my lovely bride disclosed that during a rebellious moment while I was away, she’d started “puffing vapor” to blow off some steam. I saw her pull out the cigar-sized device and,…
