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My daughter recently turned thirteen. She’ll probably roll her eyes if she ever reads this, but watching her grow has made me realize just how different her future may be from the one I imagined at her age. In about five years she’ll graduate from high school, and I have no idea what the world she’ll be stepping into will look like. Maybe every generation has looked ahead and wondered what the future would bring. But this feels different. The pace of change is unlike anything

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a group of friends when, as seems to happen more and more these days, the conversation turned to AI. One friend shared something that stayed with me. She had been listening to a podcast about artificial intelligence. The guest was describing how dramatically AI could reshape jobs, education, and society. At some point, she said she simply stopped listening. Not because she thought the speaker was wrong. Not because she disagreed. Becau

A friend said something to me recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. We were talking about AI when she paused and said, “I feel like I’m already too late.” Too late to learn it. Too late to understand it. Too late to catch up. Since then, I’ve heard versions of that same sentence from several different people. And honestly, I understand it. The pace of change right now can feel overwhelming. Every day there seems to be a new tool, a new platform, a new pred

What If Our Kids Are Already Ahead of Us? A few weeks ago, I attended a high school panel on AI here at Green School in Bali. As both a parent and someone who has been fascinated by technology for years, I was curious. I wanted to hear directly from students. How are they using AI? What excites them? What concerns them? What do they wish schools were teaching? What I didn’t expect was how much the conversation would make me reflect on my own relationship with change. The stud

For decades, I’ve been writing in my journal every night before bed, listing at least five things I’m grateful for. I’ve also recommended this practice to my clients for years because it genuinely changes what we focus on and what we notice in our lives. Sometimes I’d even challenge myself not to repeat the same things from the day before because otherwise gratitude can quietly become mechanical. We say the same things automatically without fully feeling them anymore. When my

Last week in Bali, everything stopped. The airport shut down. The streets emptied. There was no Wi-Fi. And for 24 hours, no one was allowed to leave their home. It’s called Nyepi, the Balinese New Year, but it’s nothing like what most of us think of as a “new year.” There are no parties, no countdowns, no noise. It’s a day of complete silence, reflection, and stillness observed by the entire island. What I didn’t expect was that Nyepi isn’t just about the silence. It’s about

Last week I found myself covered in bright pink, yellow, and purple powder, laughing while throwing color at friends, parents, teachers and kids at school. If you’ve ever seen photos of Holi celebrations in India, you know the images. Clouds of color in the air. People dancing. Faces streaked with paint. Laughter everywhere. It’s a festival that welcomes the arrival of spring, a joyful celebration of renewal and life after winter. For years I had seen those images and thought

The other day my daughter walked into the room frustrated. Something had happened at school. A teacher. Some classmates. The details almost don’t matter anymore because what I remember most was the tone. She was stuck in that familiar spiral where one complaint leads to another. I listened for a moment. Then I stopped her. “Wait,” I said. “Take a breath.” She paused. “Tell me something good about the situation.” She looked at me like that was the most unreasonable request I c

The impact of my great uncle’s vision Most of what we do goes unnoticed. Most of the seeds we plant grow somewhere we can’t see. Most of the conversations we have ripple far beyond our awareness. Recently, I received a message from two former clients, Amy and Molly. Their podcast is called “Meet Me in the Penthouse.” A couple years ago, I helped them launch it. They landed in the top 5 percent of global podcasts within the first month. We worked together, editing and building

For the past few weeks, my body has been operating at half capacity. Normally, my energy sits at an eight or nine out of ten. I move quickly. I hold a lot. I create momentum in my days. That’s my baseline. But during this stretch, I’ve been waking up most mornings feeling like I’m at a five. Not sick enough to cancel everything. Not well enough to feel fully like myself. The cough lingers. My stamina hasn’t fully returned. And I don’t like it. Earlier this week, I decided I w

December and January carried a weight I didn’t anticipate. There were early-morning phone calls because of the time difference back to the U.S. Conversations tied to administrative and legal responsibilities around our home — the kind that require focus and steadiness, even when your capacity already feels stretched. By the time the new year was underway, the pressure hadn’t lifted. It had simply continued. And then my body stepped in. Toward mid January, I developed chest co

There’s something many of us quietly want, whether we admit it or not: to feel validated. To know we matter. To feel seen, acknowledged, and appreciated for who we are and how we show up in the world. What we don’t often stop to examine is how easily that desire turns inward as self-criticism. For so many women, the inner voice is sharp and relentless. We replay conversations. We judge our decisions. We focus on what we should have said or done differently. Instead of buildin

I didn’t write anything the first two weeks of January. That felt intentional. Spacious. Needed. The notebooks stayed closed. My laptop stayed quiet. After the intensity of December, I let myself step into the new year without immediately asking anything of it. Now it’s January 17th—halfway through the month—and this feels like the right moment to begin again. Every January comes with its own kind of pressure. Plans, intentions, resolutions. The familiar promise to make this

We’re finishing the school term, and suddenly we’re here: three weeks off at the end of the year. Living in Bali has taught me something I’ve shared before—you can have your plans, and then there are Bali plans. Things unfold differently here. Slower. Less rigid. I’m learning to loosen my grip and move more with what’s actually happening, rather than what I thought would happen. Normally, I don’t leave travel planning to the last minute. I like structure. I like knowing what’

We were on our way to pick up my daughter from her school field trip when we saw the puppy hiding in the bushes of our parking lot. It was Friday afternoon. My daughter had been away for three days, and my husband and I were heading to meet her at the bus when something small and still caught our eye. A black-and-white puppy was wedged behind the bushes and the wheel of a parked scooter, pressed low to the ground. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t pacing. She looked like she had

I’ve always believed that life has a way of redirecting us, especially when we’re trying too hard to control the plan. But I didn’t realize how literal that could be until a simple Saturday in Bali unfolded into something far more meaningful. My husband and I were on our way to pick up our daughter from a sleepover when we decided to grab lunch nearby. He had been wanting to try a specific restaurant, and although I had my own opinions (and tendencies to steer things), we hea

The Saturday after Thanksgiving always invites a pause. The rush settles, the noise quiets, and what remains is the simple question: What does gratitude look like for me this year? For me, it’s looked nothing like a curated holiday. It’s looked like real life in Bali—messy, unpredictable, surprising, and strangely beautiful. This week alone, one neighbor’s son battled lice… twice. After she disinfected every sheet, helmet, and surface, the lice returned three days later. Anot

There are weeks that pass quietly, and then there are weeks that feel like the universe is handing you a story. A couple of weeks ago in Bali was one of those weeks. It began with something simple: my neighbor Marina, sleeves rolled up, fully devoted to a mission she took on the moment she arrived. In just three months, she’s become a one-woman movement to spay and neuter as many stray dogs and cats as she can. Not because anyone asked her to. Not because she had funding. But

There are moments in life when something so unexpected happens that it makes you pause and wonder whether what we call coincidence is actually something far more intentional. Bali has been teaching me that when I stop gripping, stop pushing, and stop trying to control the timing of everything, life moves with a kind of clarity and precision I could never manufacture. About a month ago, word spread quickly through our community chat: a rare Javanese ebony monkey had been spott

The week before Halloween, my 12-year-old daughter came home with a mission. There was no Halloween party planned at her school, and she couldn’t believe it. New to the school, she assumed it was something the school organized every year—but it turned out that in previous years, it had been run by a family who’d since moved away. Most kids would’ve sighed and let it go. But not her. She wanted a party. Within hours, she rallied several friends to join her in proposing the ide