Destination Paradise

My list of ways to survive unwanted separation has been sitting there begging to be taken up again, so here we go, I'm jumping right to one of my favorites. Coping Strategy #4: Choose joy. Choose victory. Choose to believe the miracle. This one actually took me a really long time to figure out, unfortunately. But apparently if you live every day feeling that life is awful, the world is out to get you, God has forgotten you, and things will never improve, you really start to believe it, and you get even more miserable! A friend of mine recently updated her Facebook status to say, "Choose joy." I thought that was remarkable because it's simple but so true. When everything around seems bleak, you really have to be intentional about living positively. Some days, this means pushing out thoughts of: "My husband's having a horrible day, I'm a whole country away, my son is sick, the Skype connection is too choppy to talk, and I had an awful day at wor...

You know how sometimes life's little moments are so moving for no apparent reason? Tonight I was watching the Grammy awards, and when Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban performed their tribute to Luciano Pavarotti, I was reminded of one of those moments. It was last fall when we were in Milan. We were strolling around the city center that night, down one of the main passages, where the street vendors were winding down for the night. The artists were packing up their wares and the souvenir -sellers were closing up their stands. But in one corner, an elderly man was still camped out with his portable CD player. From the crackly speakers came the orchestral strains of Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" from the opera Turandot . The legendary Luciano Pavarotti is probably responsible for immortalizing this piece, and as the song began, I was reminded that Pavarotti had died just a few weeks earlier. This elderly man had so clearly been touched by Pavarotti, probably had followed ...