Over the years, my body has shown up. It reports for duty at the meeting, the concert, the ceremony — appropriately attired and positioned to be useful. In schools and community spaces, there are plenty of days when my body is the first one through the door and sometimes it’s the last to leave. On paper, and often in practice, that looks like commitment. But lately I’ve been paying more attention to the gap between where my body is and where the rest of me is. It turns out th

Last weekend, I did a lot with my body. On Saturday morning, I started with a traditional Pilates sequence, then my trainer moved me over to the Gyrokinesis machine to try some new-to-me exercises. Later in the day, I did a lot of full body singing in choir rehearsal. On Sunday afternoon, along with my beloved choir I engaged in a very lively (and physical) vocal performance on Sunday afternoon. In between, I did some spring cleaning and my usual neighborhood walk. By Sunday

A family of doers I come from a family of doers. My mother worked seven days a week as the founding director of an adolescent, residential rehabilitation program. She did grocery store runs, drove clients to appointments, and picked them up from police stations. My grandmother taught middle school Language Arts in Philadelphia and held in‑person duties as the First Lady of her husband's (my grandfather's) large church in New York City. My father, a full‑time social worker, c

The first time I understood how much bad questions can erode trust, my feet were freezing. I was living in Denver and had just spent a February weekend in Aspen, worrying more about my feet than about the mountains. I wore thick socks. I tucked my feet under blankets. I wriggled my toes to get my blood moving. I even bought new, fur-lined boots. Nothing changed. At some point, the cold stopped feeling like winter and started feeling like, “Something is wrong with my body.” So

They say your eyesight starts to change in your 40s, but I thought that was for other people. I’d always had “good eyes.” Then, sometime around 43 or 44, I noticed that something felt…off. It was taking my eyes longer to focus when I shifted from reading a magazine to looking up at the TV. Words on the page weren’t as crisp. I was convinced something was majorly wrong – with my eyes or maybe even my brain. I made my first eye doctor appointment, half worried, half certain he’

As a tween and teen growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, walking was a means to an end. I walked because I didn’t have a ride, because the subway didn’t go where I wanted to go, because that’s how you move through a city. Later, I used to joke that I wanted to “pay for my exercise,” so if I could drive, I did — even when it would have been faster to walk. I joined a gym and got cardio on a treadmill. Back then, I cared much more about arriving than about how I got there; walk

Lately I’ve been treating my midlife body as a kind of "body of work" —paying attention to what breathwork, walking, and group exercise classes are teaching me about how I lead. Singing, it turns out, is not just what I do for joy; it’s one of the clearest mirrors I have for how I carry legacy and how I ignore or honor my limits. The Spirituals Project Choir, Denver, 2007, with artistic director, the late Bennie L. Williams As I celebrated a milestone birthday, I began a leg

The set up for a Pilates class in Playa del Carmen on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Years ago, in barre and TRX classes, being in a group exercise class meant constantly measuring myself against everyone else – how high I lifted my heels, how many reps I completed, how “together” I looked. This time, in my first group Pilates class, I wasn’t there to prove anything. I was choosing to learn in community and hoping to leave feeling more confident and more at ease in my Pila

In this current season of evolution, I’m paying closer attention to my midlife body as a kind of body of work -- and the work it performs. Our neighbor's ice chopper at work In late January, my husband and I came home from a tropical vacation to find a solid sheet of ice covering our driveway. All local hardware stores were sold out of salt and shovels. The snow‑removal folks were backed up for days. A few years ago, after a similar storm, we tried to clear our icy front step