All in Life Lessons

GIVE ME A BREAK: TRAVELING WITH A CAST ON

Cliff Simon has a history of accidental injuries. He’s been bandaged and restrained in the Bronx, the East Village, Harlem, Vero Beach, Austin, and Birmingham, with narrow escapes in Santa Fe and Queens. Recently, while recovering from a bone break from yet another fall, he found himself thinking about his accident-proneness. Was he cursed? A klutz? Or was there more to it?

Things Are Definitely Looking Up

In 1996, a then undiagnosed neurological condition had Cliff Simon fearing for his life with no hope in sight. Two months later everything had changed for the better. Now, when the gloom-and-doom media report depressing stories of the virus, of people mired in hatred, or science ignored and leaders mis-leading, he remembers how terrified he was in December of 1996. And, how quickly circumstances can improve.

The Opposite of Loneliness: How travel transforms the experience of solitude and staying home.

Thirty-seven days into self-isolation Ellen Barone asked her husband Hank, “Are you lonely?” Like much of the world’s population, they are physical-distancing and staying home to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Would this, she worried, lead to loneliness? And, in turn, to biological effects as deadly as the virus itself? Instead, isolation has brought clarity to something they’d innately suspected all along.

A Viral Pilgrimage

Elyn Aviva has spent more than half of her life going on, studying, or writing about pilgrimage—specifically, the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Today, as she adjusts to the disorientation of isolation, she poses the question: Could it be that like a pilgrimage, this pandemic offers an opportunity to journey inward and engage in deep self-exploration?

Migration Time

After eleven happy years as American expats in Spain, Elyn Aviva, and her husband Gary White, made the unexpected decision to return to the United States to make a new home in a new place.