In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book The Signature of All Things a young woman is greatly distressed because her maid’s grandmother has died.1 The young woman had never met the grandmother. She looks to a woman in late middle age for help, and this is what she hears:
“What a great heap of nonsense…At my age, can you begin to imagine how many people’s grandmothers I have seen die? What if I had wept over each one of them? A grandmother’s death does not constitute a tragedy, child and somebody else’s grandmother’s death from three years past most certainly should not bring on a fit of weeping. Grandmothers die, child. It is the proper way of things. One could nearly argue that it is the role of a grandmother to die…”
I have recently received two missives related to death. One friend thinks it “sad and unfair” that his 70-year-old friend died quickly of pancreatic cancer. Of course, my friend and the family and friends of the man who died are sad. But I don’t find it sa
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How you allocate and use your time every day is as important to productivity as the work you actually do. You have to be smart and strategic about when you work, what you work on, and how long you do it otherwise, some of your time may be wasted.
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