With a new, and bigger phone, all my essentials no longer fit in the same little wristlet I’d been using.

It was last year. Spring was about to break when my boys and I were walking home from school.  The uneven sidewalks on City Island disappear completely in some spots. In others, they disintegrate into dirt or dust.

They’d wreak havoc on my shoes, if I let them. I generally walk in the street.

I was walking over the sewer when I dropped my keys.

“Noooooooooo!” I cried, hoping the chunky concoction of keys and rings–the big, bright-orange-red C of a keychain my husband had gifted me–would catch, and balance, on the grates.

But they went straight through.

Embarrassed by how guttural my scream had been, I reassured the boys I was o.k. We were o.k.

Wildly inconvenienced, but o.k.

Hearing the scream, my neighbor, Stephanie, turned around. Seeing my two kids and I still intact, she hazarded the next best guess.

“Keys?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Call 311.”

I don’t watch much T.V. In fact, when my husband and I met, I didn’t own a T.V. Then he bought me one. Let’s just say it was kind of a package deal.

All these years later, I still don’t watch much T.V. Aside from a movie with family, or lately, in an attempt to help me manage some late night anxiety, Dominic will turn on Frasier re-runs. I’ve never been able to resist that show. All I have to do is see the white outline of the Seattle skyline begin to be drawn and I’m hooked.

It must have been Saturday night, we were watching Frasier, I was laughing out loud, it was good. Dominic changed the channel and Saturday Night Live was on. There was this hilarious skit about how Valentine’s Day has been appropriated in all these truly awkward ways. By people’s moms and dads was one example, by colleagues and business associates was another. They were all funny. I laughed some more. It was good. It was true. I thought of you.

Some trusted sources recommended I start the New Year resting, practicing radical self-care & compassion, and—thankfully, this one comes easy for me—reading. In past years, I might have resisted all but the reading part, guilted myself out of what’s best for me, or even scoffed at the thought.

But, I’m at the point in my writing journey where I can no longer deny what I know is true. Self-care and self compassion are essential to sharing my story with you. I’ve recently made a big breakthrough on my book and now that I know what it’s about, I’m committed to making massive progress toward its completion in 2019 (stay tuned).

Meanwhile, between reading client work–and skimming materials that might support it and them–and what I read for personal and professional growth, pleasure, and my book group’s selection of the month, I’ve probably got seven titles going at the moment.

In a post-script to a recent FB post marking the end of my first course-retreat launch, I wrote: This is the End of the Little Island I Call Home.

I meant it literally. I was down on the beach at end of the Island sitting in the sand.  I couldn’t do more in that moment than promise to write a blog post–as soon as I got some rest–sharing with you all I’d learned when I hadn’t sold enough spots to make walkyourtalk2018.com a go for 2018.

“Where can we see one of your talks, Clementina?” Two business-friends asked in unison.

We were all at a conference where I’d become known for helping people write talks. I’d seen these two gentlemen at the bar and had gone over to say hello. They complimented my work, shared some great feedback they’d heard about me, and then promptly put me on the spot.

“Mom, want me to teach you a Levitating Hand Trick?”

When my oldest was eight, he presented the question to me one Sunday morning. Finished with my second cup of coffee, I felt up for the challenge.

“Hold out your arm,” he instructed, getting right to work. He pushed down so gently that when he removed the pressure, nothing happened.

“Maybe it only works on kids,” he offered.

“I’m sure it works on adults too. Want to try again?”

We did.

Ten days before Christmas, my husband fell in love with a lab-hound in a pink rhinestone collar. I can’t blame him; she’s fetching. Her eyes are so intelligent, they remind me of Virginia Woolf’s.

I suppose I’m partly responsible; beyond our travel-work schedules, Dominic and I are terrible at syncing our calendars. Roughly two times a year, we double book; it’s annoying but not annoying enough for either of us to have remedied the situation yet.

“Forget you had a grandmother?” It’s what mine always said to me when I waited too long to call or stop by.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about her, I had.

But I was a twenty something year old English professor and it was the end of the semester, which always landed me in scarcity around time. I wouldn’t even call to say hi or stop in and check on her like I normally did because I’d so much rather go over for what usually amounted to at least an hour, if not an entire afternoon.

When Tamsen Webster invited me to be a VIP at the Boston Opera House on October 12, 2017 for TEDx Cambridge, I started packing. Tamsen had previously asked me if I’d be interested in weighing in on the talks, providing much needed feedback to the participants as they began the several month process of distilling their areas of expertise into succinctly prepared–18 minutes or less– talks deemed worthy of TED’s tagline, “ideas worth spreading.”

“After all,” she said. “This is what you do.”