I'm a firm believer in Pablo Picasso's famous quote about every child being an artist.  I have yet to encounter a child that hasn't dived right in at the chance to create something special out of anything from Play-doh to a pile of rocks and sticks.  Children all seem to have an innate sense of order, balance and beauty that is completely unique to them and their perspective.  For one child, a meticulously organized row of pennies might bring them joy, for others a splattered canvas covered in paint.  As adults, we often seem to forget about the myriad paths to self expression, settling instead for the limited vocabulary of words, text and the occasional emoji.  We seem to forget that movement is self expression and find fewer opportunities to dance around just for the joy of it.  We seem to forget that there is inherent value in creating works of art or literature, instead shelving these pursuits for others that make more money but perhaps create little happiness.  Today, I hope you take a few moments to think of the forms of expression that bring you the most fulfillment.  

So few things inspire compassion as much as travel.  I sometimes lament the fact that travel now seems to have morphed into something we do for invisible audiences, something to do to capture a worthy image for social media.  A lot of my travel through the world predated even Facebook, and I'm grateful for that fact.  With no invisible audience awaiting my reports back to home, I was able to fully immerse myself in other cultures, and completely redefine what it means to "have" a home, food, water, friends and family.  I once wandered down a dirt road in Costa Rica past a woman residing in a one bedroom wooden house with her four children.  In Belize, barefoot children chased after chickens beneath their home, a single room wooden structure on stilts, while their mother pumped water manually from the ground.  Still, compassionate for the less fortunate is the baseline of compassion - the easiest kind of compassion to muster.  True compassion requires love for all people and animals, even the ones we have never met.  If our compassion is restricted only to what is most immediate around us, we have not even begun to scratch its true potential.  

 The older I get, the easier I find it to maintain equanimity, particularly in the face of uncomfortable, upsetting or even dire circumstances.  A lot of this seems to stem from the simple collection of experiences.  Once you have overcome a circumstance that seemed terrible at the time, your definition of terrible becomes slightly altered.  Once you have had the benefit of time and hindsight, it becomes easier to see the blessings that came from hardship.  Calm isn't just something we seek during times of frenzy or challenges, it's something to find scattered throughout each day. 

There is such an onslaught of information each and every day that it can be difficult to wade through everyone else's opinions to reach our own truth.  Would we want to wear that coat if we hadn't just seen it on the back of someone attractive on Instagram?  Would we still want to get that graduate degree if we had never heard our parents' own aspirations for our career?  Would we show up to that fitness class if none of our friends were going to be there?  Would we vote for this person if we had never heard someone else's opinion favoring them? It's always useful to check in from time to time and ensure that we are living our lives from our own sense of what is valuable and important, instead of being led around by others all of the time.