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Your Life: a soundtrack

Music is the soundtrack of your life. – Dick Clark The other day, I was sitting on my couch having a glass of wine with a friend. We were talking about music and she mentioned Nirvana. All of a sudden I had this weird time warp experience. I was transported back to the early 90ies, to a room in the McNair barracks in Berlin. I was dating a very kind but wrong for me G.I. and spent many weekends in Berlin listening to ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’, drinking too much Jack Daniels and eating Ruffles w [...]

Miranda2020-07-28T08:42:11+02:00July 31st, 2020|

Can money buy happiness?

Remember when you were a kid and you couldn't wait for school to start? Or summer vacation? Or your birthday? Or Christmas Day? You felt butterflies in your stomach. You couldn't sleep at night. You talked about it all the time. You kept asking your parents how many more nights there were to sleep before it was finally there. All this anticipation is half the fun as they say, although you didn't understand it back then of course! And even as adults, we don't often consider anticipation as half t [...]

Miranda2020-05-04T15:14:17+02:00May 8th, 2020|

A comfortable margin

My friends say that I am well organised. That I like to plan ahead - way ahead! They also call me punctual. I call that 'having a comfortable margin'. I don't like stress (who does?). So I plan. I ask myself: what do I need to do or put in place so I don't get stressed? Leave 10 minutes earlier for example. Sometimes that gets me to my appointment 10 minutes earlier (which allows me to have a coffee or revise the topic of my meeting), sometimes traffic is bad or something else happens and I'm ju [...]

Miranda2020-03-10T08:56:05+02:00March 13th, 2020|

The space of less

Less things. Less plans. Less have to's. Less information. It sounds counterintuitive, yet it seems to be what we most need and crave. We live in a world of 'needing to be up to speed/date' in case we miss out on the latest news/trends/happenings/opportunities. But too much information, too many choices and things lead to overwhelm and overload and we're unable to filter out what is really important. Instead of wanting, needing and doing more, how about we start trusting our intuition and feeli [...]

Miranda2019-11-12T09:07:26+02:00November 22nd, 2019|

The benefits of doing something ‘useless’

Remember when you were a kid and time seemed endless? Remember losing yourself in playful activities, roaming in the woods for hours on end, building a fort with no plan, dancing? Remember doing things just for the sake of doing them? Although play is not reserved for children, we seem to lose the right to play when we move into adulthood. In our high speed world of today, everything we do seems geared towards something: a goal, an achievement, a level to be reached, someone to impress. Studies [...]

Miranda2019-09-17T08:54:55+02:00September 20th, 2019|

Time to feel

The other day I was reading a very good fiction book (The last anniversary by Liane Moriarty) and in one of the chapters, one of the characters recently had a baby. When her husband goes back to work after two weeks at home, she can’t seem to think or feel straight. Everything seems overwhelming, everything seems to take a superhuman effort. And yes, it may be due to the lack of sleep one has a new parent, but chemically, hormonally things were upset in her body. She mentions at some point that [...]

Miranda2019-04-30T08:01:37+02:00May 3rd, 2019|