Okay, here's part of the menu of my conversation with my friend Jeff Nischwitz:

Stop planning your future - you're gonna miss it.

When I choose to get up from the smackdown.

You ask too many questions!

I'm willing to be wrong.

Fierce and tender

Can I just kiss your heart?

Look at our behavior as a way to protect ourselves.

We don't have to save people.

And that's just for starters. Jeff is funny, humble, powerful and able to 'hold space' for other people in his life. 

He's absolutely present, and a gift (get it?) as we follow his path, fierce and tender.

Never know what's going to show up when you click 'record'!

My friend Noemi Beres (Make it Better # 98: "Up 'til Denmark") led Deb and me to hold a conversation. And how! 

As we each step into our day, a little foggy yet but wondering What's Up?, we are reminded how little we control of the next moment. Deb has been loaded up with some powerful episodes of cancer and change, which she recounts with wry humor and acceptance. 

We hold together as we walk side-by-side, virtually holding hands through a great meander. Please join us so you can grasp her insight as she tells me - and you - why one of her gals was to make her doctors laugh.

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So. 

Buckle your seatbelts. 

Jennifer Fiedler is blunt, subtle, quick, measured, a wonderful soup of contradictions and a bright light for candor and truth. We merrily dash along while playing play ping-pong. We explore the movie business (a hefty chunk of her life), family (dys)function, lessons (un)learned, all of these with no reticence or shields up.

We agree that we've all had trauma, joy, and . . .  you know the list for yourself. And that most often, our scars can be forgiven, as unwitting damage.

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Noemi and I travel well together. Liable to laughter, a couple of people who love to listen and reflect rather than talk at. We have a ball - she lives in Cyprus, via a life spent growing exponentially as she left and returned to Hungary. She loves language (ditto here), especially Scandinavian languages (and culture). From good girl to ring-in-nose force for growth and change, she's become a wonderful friend.

Join us for topics like 'glue doesn't work in Cyprus', 'sewing my life together' (literally), collage, and "I love this person who I have become," as we explore what happened up 'til Denmark and what happened next.

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Two very different and almost identical travelers, David Abel and I. 

We both explore and breathe curiosity. David is demonstrably ambitious, I more demonstrably gestalt. His childhood Dickensian, mine bourgeois, yet each gave birth to a hunger for experience and a reasonably ambiguous approach to normal.

Signposts in our conversation turned us toward learning we couldn't hold back our own tides, being told we were 'very average,' and the insight we each felt when we realized we couldn't remember the 'last time I had heard my footsteps.'

Competition, grace, breathing, and the wonderful insight that the point of maximum fear is the point of minimum danger. Travel with us for a bit and put up your feet (then listen to your steps!)

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As Lauri Smith and I traveled together for about an hour, I watched in my mind's eye a slide show of my childhood. We both were fine playing alone, we loved acting out stories and episodes. Both introverts. Both shy. Both actors and performers. Both empathetic, sometimes awkwardly so. 

She told me about how she lost my way doing the good girl thing and how heavy the armor in front of my heart can become, at the end bringing these together around the quote attributed to Victor Frankl: 

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." 

Come along for a brief shared journey - put your feet up and just listen.

Thanks.

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Laurie Gardner and I share the dearth of a concept: career. We could be politely described as peripatetic, by others taken with sarcasm as short attention-spanned. 

Laurie has tended bar around the world, including competing and doing well in mixology competitions. He has been cabin crew for an airline, and even worked in the construction industry for starters. We cover money, 'too much truth,' being a contrarian (that's a librarian who breaks the rule of silence :), 'too nice,' psychological safety, the loss of a value-driven society, and the 6th creature.

Please join us for a tilt-a-whirl journey as we enjoy being wildly curious.

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Eyra and Mathieu collided with me in a conversation at The Friendship Bench. I have misplaced the topic, but not the experience. So I asked them to talk and listen for a bit and off we went - the quantum past, limiting beliefs, what sparks us, the soul is safe, eliminate the word 'better,' bags of sand, 'when (s)he's there, it's different'. 

And that was for starters. 

The two Nederlanders found each other, and found their focus, while letting go of the barriers and blockages that prevented them from accepting that 'everything is already there.'

We had a fantastic time as we approached our landing with you are whole . . . you just forgot.

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Smoothly, professionally, I approach with "I really enjoyed your presentation on AI." Luckily, it's true, and Michelle gets that, so we had a great introduction, which led to lunch, a ping-pongy conversation, a friendship and this podcast. Wait until you hear about her foot and the subway door, her solo Odyssey in Asia, her lumpy bumpy road to her here and now.

Michelle clarifies and illuminates each time she focuses on any idea. We are riding a tandem bike. But it's side-by-side, not front-and-back. Have a party with us, okay?

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"Doesn't work up to expectations" was inscribed repeatedly on my report card. Heather's too. She's danced professionally, I coincidentally, and we both love it. We talk about raising thinkers, loving what is whether we like it or not, discovering and working the shift that makes us feel better, and moments of humanity.

A community of two, old friends rediscovered, two people finding themselves in the same lifeboat and figuring out how to row, though not identically, together, and, of course, realizing that of course it's non-linear.

Join us.

Please.

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