Good morning from New York City. I have a lot of bits and pieces going through my mind today but before I start I want to say thank you so much for all the love notes I got on my birthday. You know, in my family growing up, birthdays were not that big of a deal.  I’m terrible at remembering other people’s birthdays and it’s always kind of surprising and so nice to be the recipient of all of the sweet messages,  so thank you. I had a great day.

For the last few years, I start my birthday with some sort of body treatment, It’s a way of stepping into the day by taking a special moment for myself and I did that again this year. Later I took a friend to lunch, and then I took a group of five Pickleball pals to see the comedian Zarna Garg live here in New York City. I thought laughing would be the perfect way to start the year, and in fact it was. We had a lovely evening.

So a couple things are running through my mind. One came from a conversation I had at lunch yesterday, and it was about taking on other people’s stuff. This friend I was speaking with is a classic long term corporate executive who left the corporate world and started her own company. Interestingly a couple of job opportunities in the corporate world have popped up and in our conversation  I asked so what does your husband say? And without getting into the details of her personal life what came out of that conversation was how we all have different ideas about security and money, how you manage your money and how much you need to save and these types of things. Oftentimes in a relationship, when people bring their own history and their own backgrounds, this can be a major point of contention. Like some people are super risk averse. Some people have an incredible scarcity mindset and fear of money.Sometimes people have a lot of money and feel like they don’t have enough. These types of things.

Anyway, this is not about financial matters only. What we were talking about is how easy it is, especially in your most intimate relationships, to take on the stuff of other people. The order in which people think something should be done, or their fears and doubts, or even their concern about what other people will say and think. Naturally in a really close relationship, so many aspects of our lives and our personalities become enmeshed and, if we’re not careful, we can take on other people’s views and their baggage and their use of language. We were talking about how long it can take sometimes to catch ourselves and to realize that maybe what we’re saying or thinking isn’t our truth or our reality. Anyway, I don’t know exactly where I want to go with that except for to say that’s something I’ve been noodling this morning.

The other thing I was thinking about is how impactful it can be when you consciously tweak your thinking and language around certain things. In fact, what I was thinking about was how when I came back from my six months away from New York, one of the things I heard myself saying (and in fact, it was a note to self, I was sending a message to myself) was that I wanted to have a new relationship with New York. And I found myself several times over the last weeks thinking oh, this is new or Oh, this is fun. And yes, of course, sometimes you just get lucky and good things happen but I do feel when I reframed my thinking and my language around New York I sort of opened a new door for myself, and I feel like there’s a lot of fresh air coming in and it feels good.

So, that’s what’s on my mind this morning. That and the fact that I have a buddy in from Milan and we’re walking down to the flower market and I’m looking forward to the nice long weekend. For those of you outside of the United States, it’s Memorial Day weekend and the official start of summer in the United States. I’ll end here. Until next time, from my heart to yours.