When I was very young, a school friend of mine introduced me to a new comedian named Bill Cosby.  He was different from many of the other popular comedians.  They just told jokes.  Cosby told wildly exaggerated stories from his childhood along with his own brand of microphone sound effects that we thought were hilarious.  Even though I didn’t grow up in South Philadelphia where he did, I could always relate to his stories because they were so universal and were told from a child’s point of view. We listened to his albums so many times that it became...

I live on a quiet little street in North Potomac, MD.  Most of the time, this is an advantage.  Very few cars come by because we aren’t a thoroughfare to any other street.  The one disadvantage is that we usually are the last street in the county to get plowed when it snows.  This last monster storm left us in the wilderness from Friday until Tuesday afternoon…nary of car track to be seen.  I had the thought, a couple of times, to just go out there and use my snow shovel to clear the street but I thought I would surely kill or injure myself in the...

I think forgiveness is one of the hardest virtues to practice.  We all know it is probably the right thing to do but there is something about doing it that brings up a lot of resistance.  I’ve often wondered why this is so. Sometimes we hesitate to forgive because we fear that if we forgive someone, we might be  condoning what they did and perhaps giving them permission to do it again.  We mistakenly believe that by not forgiving someone, we prevent them from hurting us anymore.  I don’t think the two are related.  I think those whom we haven’t...

The Law of Attraction has been around for years (maybe forever) and has recently received a lot of attention in the media.  The criticisms of this basic “you get back what you put out” principle range from it being too simplistic to it being too materialistic and superficial e.g., “I just kept envisioning a check in my mailbox and sure enough, one appeared.  It was a miracle!”  Now that most of the hype from the DVD, “The Secret” has worn off, I find myself returning to this principle with more appreciation for what it offers in terms...