Monday Morning Feb 17 #Valentine's Day

We do most of our living between Friday night and Monday morning.  Monday morning is the time to reflect on the weekend and get back into our week day routine . As I get older it becomes more difficult to get myself  moving on Monday morning.   I guess that is part of what retirement planning is about - letting go of the weekday routine and spreading the rest of your life over seven days!





Monday, February 17, 2014

Valentine's Day is over for another year.   I detest how commercial this day has become.  The marketing and advertising world has created this hype of what love is and how it should be celebrated.    Always portrayed as two beautiful heterosexual couples madly in love and the only real way to express it is through the gift of "hearts on fire" diamonds.  This serves no one but retailers and alienates many in our society who don't line up with those manufactured ideals.

Love has many forms and faces in our lives and I totally agree it is to be celebrated.  Genuine and authentic celebrations of love are all around us at Valentines.   I just wanted to acknowledge a few that I encountered during Valentines 2014:

Ellen Page's speech at the Time to Thrive Conference in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg#t=21


The Sunday New York Times Book Review section dedicated to Love.  One of the features was to ask contemporary writers what literature had taught them about love.  There was a great quote from Ann Patchett:

"Literature has taught me that love means different things at different points in our lives, and that often as we get older we gravitate toward the quieter, kinder plotlines, and find them to be richer than we had originally understood them to be"

My most favourite example of an authentic and real valentine moment was the Valentine's card received by our friends, James and Cathy from their daughter Olivia:

And, of course, dancing with my husband on Valentine's night.