I was walking around Golden Gate Park recently, chatting with my spiritual running buddy Tricia Barrett, when Tricia piped up, “So how many apples have you eaten today.”

I had only eaten a bowl of brussels sprouts for breakfast, so I answered, “None.”

Have you ever noticed how your happiness seems dependent on people doing what you want them to do or circumstances working out the way you want them to?  Yeah, me too.

When they do: Great! Nothing succeeds like success!

But what if people don’t do what you want and things don’t go your way? Not so great, right?

"Grief can make a liar out of you because there is a disconnect between how you feel, and how you think you're supposed to behave."

This was Maria Shriver's intro to her heart-gripping talk at the 2009 Women's Conference. I stumbled across the live telecast. The topic: Grief, Healing & Resilience. Interesting topic for a conference. That's kind of pushing it, I thought.

I’m forty years old but only one or two people have ever seen me angry. I’m the picture of cool rationality almost all the time. Friends remark on how calm I am. My mother tells me that as a child, she never had any idea of when I was mad. When I was in marriage counseling, the therapist would try to get me to express anger. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. But, this morning, I lost it over a pair of shoes. And, when I say “lost it”, I mean I was screaming, throwing things, crying, and came “this close” to walking out, in the pouring rain, in 50 degree weather, IN MY BARE FEET.