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Running the Slant

a new route for everyday life

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  • Summer morning in PA

    The Slant

    On actively choosing my life

    July 17, 2019

    Summers in Pennsylvania were the highlight of my year as a kid. Every summer, my mom and I would drive down from New York and spend a week visiting her side of the family in

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  • The Slant

    Chutes and Ladders

    October 30, 2018

    A few days ago, I had this thought that life is kind of like standing in the middle of a ring of knife throwers at the circus. And I legitimately started writing about that, except

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    • “Happiness of heart can never be measured out and bundled up; it's intangible. We keep running after it, grasping for it, and the heat of our running so seldom brings it closer. But now and then there may be a moment. We look at something and know it is good and beautiful. Those moments are happiness.” – Gladys Bagg Taber, an all-the-time favorite but especially so at this time of year
    • Sharing just a few of my favorite memories on the day we are celebrating you, because you gave us so much to celebrate. By the way, you also literally gave so much, a fact that I remember every time a random object stops me in my tracks. The candle in our living room. Meringue powder. A mattress. A t-shirt at the bottom of my pajama bin. The cancer dice. (I totally kept the cancer dice, mostly because I knew it would make you laugh someday.) But of course, these things are things, and the real gift was always you. You are loved beyond words and are already missed beyond words. And just as those two realities exist simultaneously, side by side, we won’t be ok and we’ll be ok. We’ll keep having dance parties and eating chips and watching The Great British Baking Show and taking care of each other. We’ll make sure the play-doh colors don’t get mixed. We’ll wish you were here every second of every day. Thank you for making life so full of the things that matter most, for showing us how to #choosejoy when it would be way easier to choose something other than joy. And thank you for these leggings I’m wearing right now. I love you, I love you, I love you.
    • Sometimes a good meal is exactly what you need, and this white bean and sausage ragu from @smittenkitchen was exactly what today needed. Not pictured: a grainy, seedy olive bread from @giantfoodstores with lots of garlic butter; warm chocolate chip cookies from @annieshomegrown. Life has been been very halfway-homemade lately and I am here for it.
    • This lantern fest was beautiful and chaotic, breathtaking and swift. Basically exactly like real life.
    • An especially lovely field trip to work not-from-home this morning.
    • It was more of a multiple layers beach vacation than a multiple swimsuits beach vacation. We came to that conclusion on the first day when we lasted all of five minutes on the actual beach due to whipping wind and sideways sand. The forecast looked fairly grim, so we set our expectations accordingly. But then, over and over again, the sun came out. Not for long. Not with much warmth. But it was the sun, the most capricious of vacation guests. I think if we had been expecting warmth and sunshine for all four days, we would have been disappointed with the weather we had. But since we were expecting the weather to be less-than-ideal, every time the sun came out, it felt like a gift. I don’t think the secret to life is lowering your expectations. But I do think there’s something to be said for putting expectations in their place and welcoming whatever comes as a gift, whether it’s cold gray wind or hot pink sunsets. It leaves so much more space to enjoy what you do have instead of wishing for what you thought you’d have. All of that to say, it was a great few days away with my mom. And I’m glad the weather was exactly the way it was—even when I wasn’t so glad for it in the moment.

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