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Showing posts from March, 2011

On Learning to Play Again

“I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” Leo Buscaglia A while back I got serious, not in a good way...way too serious. I forgot how to play. Small children, tantrums, sleepless nights, financial worries, health scares, struggling businesses, too much responsibility and an inability to ask for help sent me on a downwards spiral. I spent the early years of our daughters lives (now 13 and 17) rushing from one task to another, forgetting to breathe deeply, mostly forgetting to savour the small moments. A bout with melanoma and a baby with severe asthma made me plunge even more deeply into a frenzied pattern of work and denial, eventually leading to a breakdown (breakthrough:)) at the age of 33. I spent months suffering from debilitating panic attacks and finally made the decision to walk away from the business that was slowly swallowing me up. I had been running on automatic, with clenched jaw and shallo