There are times when we know something in our lives needs attention, but we cannot necessarily put our finger on one single thing that needs to change. We may recognize patterns that keep repeating, feel disconnected from parts of ourselves that once felt very familiar, notice that certain areas of life seem to take far more energy than they should, or we reach a point where we know it would be worthwhile to stop and look at ourselves more closely.

We use the word energy all the time. We say we have none left, that someone changed the energy in a room, that certain foods give us energy, or that getting outside and moving can somehow make us feel more alive. Most of us recognize these experiences immediately, but we rarely stop to ask what is actually happening, why our energy can change so quickly, or how much of what we feel each day may be influenced by what we eat, how we move, and the people around us,

Everything has its own way of being in the world, and we recognize that far more readily than we may realize. A rose does not present itself in the same way as a pine tree, just as wild orange has a completely different character from patchouli, and frankincense creates a very different experience from eucalyptus. We notice these differences through scent, colour, shape, chemistry, and our own response to them, but there is often something more difficult to describe as well.

For most of us in Canada, water has always seemed abundant. We turn on the tap and expect it to be there. And most of the time it is! But increasingly erratic weather is changing the way we need to think about water. Long dry stretches can be followed by sudden heavy rain — sometimes so much, so quickly, that instead of soaking into the ground, it rushes away.

We have become very accustomed to deciding whether a food is good for us by turning the package around and reading the numbers. We look at calories, protein, fibre, sugar, and perhaps a few vitamins and minerals, and if the numbers seem respectable, it is easy to assume that the body will experience that food in much the same way as another food containing similar nutrients.

The cuddly baby becomes the fiercely independent toddler. The toddler becomes the child with questions about absolutely everything. The child becomes the preteen who suddenly has opinions about clothes, music, privacy, friends — and, occasionally, the astonishing incompetence of every adult in the house.

How do you let your child become their own person without losing the relationship that helped them become one?

When we send a child back to school in September, most of our attention naturally goes toward the things we can see and prepare for. We make sure the shoes still fit, find the backpack, buy the supplies, figure out who the teacher will be, wonder whether any familiar friends will be in the classroom, organize lunches and transportation, and, particularly with younger children, spend at least a little time wondering how that first morning is going to go.

Long before January meant resolutions, diets, gym memberships, and promises about what we were going to do differently, September was already teaching us what a new beginning felt like. For twelve or thirteen years, and considerably longer for anyone who continued into college or university, our lives were divided not primarily by calendar years but by school years, and every September we crossed a very clear boundary from the person we had been into the person we were now ex

In The Cost of Never Stopping, we spent a lot of time talking about how busy we have become, but one of the most important things we discovered was that being busy doesn't necessarily mean being physically active. We can have an exhausting day mentally and emotionally while our bodies have barely changed position, or we can have a day in which our bodies have been working almost constantly while our minds are dealing with their own demands at the same time.

How many times have you heard someone say, “Where does the time go?” or “I can't believe it's August already”? We talk about time as though something has happened to it, as though the years are moving faster, the weeks have somehow become shorter, and there simply aren't as many hours in a day as there used to be. Of course, there are. We have exactly the same twenty-four hours that we had in 1986, 1996, or 2006, and yet for many of us those hours feel very different. Maybe w