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Thrive by Ariana Huffington

I have just spent the last six weeks recovering from a fall. In a hurry, I stepped on my husband’s shoes, turned my ankle which caused a dislocation and three broken bones. Surgery followed the next morning.

Life, God, The Universe, or carelessness –your option, tends to slow us down when we are on tear through life.

I read Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive a year ago…but now I get it. In her book, she addresses succinctly the cost to our Well-being, Wisdom, Wonder, and Giving affected by our need to succeed.  I’m a teacher for pity’s sake, how could I compare my life to Huffington’s fabulously well-known rich life? Good question, actually. We only have 24 hours a day. Our intensity for what we do with those 24 hours remain the same.

“What is a good life?” has been a question asked by philosophers going back to the ancient Greeks.  But somewhere along the line we abandoned the question and shifted our attention to how much money we make, how big a house we can buy, and how high we can climb up the career. Those are legitimate questions, particularly at a time when women are still attempting to gain an equal seat at the table. But as I painfully discovered, they are far from the only questions that matter in creating a successful life.

When a fellow teacher lost her son to an accidental drowning recently, I was upset because I had to really think who she was. Why? I’m not antisocial. I just work every moment I’m not with kids in the classroom. I don’t take opportunities to just talk to others. I don’t take breaks. I don’t eat lunch with others, like many business people I eat at my desk.  When I do, I do so rarely I’m asked “why am I here?”  I’m not a friend to any of them. Between lesson planning, meetings, grading, phone calls SLOs, exit tickets, formative assessment, and summative assessments for six classes, I just felt I wasn’t successful if I was in any way behind. I worked many twelve hours days last year and on weekends. I, like my early life, felt if I follow the many rules I would be a master teacher. Maybe.  Maybe not.

I get the best results when I can have fun with my students and we learn together. Try as I might, they seem to learn what they think is important. I pray that sometime as they go on to other classes, they will remember a lesson and think “Ah, KHorn.  Now I know why she stressed this.” They learn more when they are relaxed and have choices. They cannot relax with a frazzled, unfriendly teacher.

I have only given you a small taste of the wisdom between the covers of this book. No matter if you are a person balancing a teaching job, a corporate job, waitress, or entrepreneur, stress is stress. It is not healthy when it is overwhelming.

As mentioned in the introduction–but is so important it bears repeating–women in highly stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease and heart attacks compared with their less-stressed colleagues, and a 60 percent greater risk for type 2 diabetes (a link that does not exist for men, by the way). Women who have heart attacks are almost twice as likely as men to die within a year of the attack, and women in high-stress jobs are more likely to become alcoholics than women in low-stress jobs.

Huffington does approach all this from the career-woman point of view. Women who are single-parents, who manage children and a job, or who are still responsible for a job, children, and a household along with a husband, or truly in the middle between family and aging parents need to read this book to glean the wisdom she has to offer.

To purchase the book through Amazon:

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