Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in Pursuing Happiness
If we could savor at least some things in each day as if they might be the last time we would experience them, how much more joyous might our lives be?
As the recent concert of the Crozet Community Orchestra showed, there is a beating heart in every community, a spirit central to our lives and happiness as Americans. .
There are some silly differences in close relationships. The humor and acceptance that comes from negotiating through them help build the foundation that gets people through rough times.
Nearly a hundred years ago, Dr. Frances Weld Peabody said "The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient." That requires empathy.
The next time technology captures your time and energy, ask yourself: am I really living the life I want to live?
I have a love affair with spring. It's been going on as long as I can remember. Its promise and its gifts never fade.
My wife has been, and remains, the muse for my own efforts to learn how to live. I will never achieve her ability for aging joyfully, but I will always be grateful that she shows me how
Simple pleasures and the ability to add simplicity into one’s thinking provide rich rewards amidst the complexity and confusion in which we live.
We are a social species, needing human connection. Yet loneliness is scarring the American landscape.
As I age, it would be easy to mark my life by its losses. They keep piling up. But I’d prefer to attend to the gifts my life still gives.
Americans are too angry, but living is choosing. As we face life’s pressures and pains, we can decide to savor something in each moment of our lives rather than strike out at others or ourselves.
My stained glass work is part of my answer to the question: what is a full life? It brings a measure of sanity in an often crazy world.
My brother passed away recently. His final weeks in hospice care somehow stand out as one of the richest parts of my life. I was surprised and initially troubled at that thought. How could this be so?
We enter the world alone, in the first of life's separations, and we hold the hands of those leaving life so that death is not such a lonely parting. Our lives in between are a search for connection. Holding hands unites us.
Yearning for dignity is human. Having it is foundational to the American republic, built as it is on respect for the individual. Yet so many Americans demand respect but don’t extend it to others.
We can choose to live a life of gratitude, for both the gifts of love, beauty, and life we receive and for those we are privileged to be able to offer others.
Those who want to extend life indefinitely seem to lack the understanding of how precious life is precisely because it is short. They would live in just one world, as if the earth and the sun could be as majestically glorious without each other.
We don't all get to realize our dreams, but with passion, we can be lifelong dreamers. Not every actor in the Stardust Diner will make it big, but they all have something big inside them.
They don’t make many romantic comedies anymore, even as our lives testify to the centrality of love, to the need to find someone who sees the best in us. Do film-makers just find this too sentimental for our times?
In our current culture, with its emphasis on "me," the film Me Before You offers homage to the transforming power of focusing outside ourselves.
