The bar was filled with velvet couches and plush chairs and the menu was just as she had hoped: innovative and snappy, with pages upon pages of creative drinks.

Maybe a drink would calm her nerves. The mid-day sun shone white in the cold. He smiled when he saw her. She smiled back, but wasn’t sure if it was driven by anxiety or joy.

Through the lunch, she listened to her voice jabbering forward and felt his breath rise and fall. He was familiar like a favorite teddy bear but not essentially like a lover.

The tea-soaked salmon tasted fishy. The tuna was over-cooked. Even the dessert was banal - caramelized fruit with vanilla ice cream. The hotel could purport world-class decor but it was driven by the provincial sensibility of her city, which was fine for an urban market or bread bakery but not for a downtown hotel.

In the aftermath, as she whisked him to the airport in time for the last flight of the day, she knew that she was fulfilling Rilke’s famous quote: “For one human being to love another, that is the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test of proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

She could care about him deeply and have fond memories of hope - but he was not the right man for her.

Her time was precious; soon her kids would come back. And as she drove away from the curb, his back turned to rush into the frenetic terminal, she knew she would prefer infinitely her own pillowtop bed to an austere hotel room with a played-out fantasy and a person from her past.

And then she understood: the bathroom at the restored hotel, all early 20th century tile with a grotto shower and sleek sink but then the garbage can - a black plastic Bed Bath special in the far corner, hard to find and ultimately unsophisticated. It had been a metaphor, a message, a sign that only she could read.

The evening fell a cloak before her and she went about her life, speaking on behalf of clients and smiling before strangers. She declined a drink with a nice man to carry home penne with eggplant and tomatoes.

That night, as her head hit the pillow, she had no regrets and no trouble falling asleep.

An article about Sidney Weinberg, the late leader of Goldman Sachs who came up from Brooklyn poverty to lead the financial world; looks at how outsiders profit by staying outside the main, by their very different qualities and sensibilities, by staying different instead of trying to blend.

Most of the time, I cling to the familiar and the quiet: staying at home on a weekend night with a blanket around my legs and a movie on the flat-screen TV. But when pressed to go out into the world - whether it’s to work the crowds at Hiller’s Family Day or to laugh so hard my eyes hardly open at John Heffron’s Comedy Castle show or to stroll along the fragrant wood chips of Tappan Middle School’s student garden and dine on just-picked chard and spicy mustard greens - I am ever happy that I went.

When I was growing up a secular Jew in the suburbs of Detroit, the ideal was to blend with the mainstream. To remain Jewish, but to cheer the high school team on at Friday night’s football game.

It was our family’s tradition to invite Gentile friends to the Passover Seder. The notion that we could accomplish anything in America, rise to uncharted heights, be just like anyone else, drove everything we did. And when I celebrated Christmas with John’s family in New Jersey, I ate salty summer sausage and sharp gouda cheese without thought. 

The one thing we didn’t realize was it was nearly impossible to get to the perceived top AND remain staunchly, observantly Jewish.

I’ve lived on both sides now and no longer believe it is possible to be everything at once. Like the time in my early 20s I realized I couldn’t be a CEO, first female President AND super-mom.

I see it now, too. I am running a company. A family. A self. When my kids are off school for in-service or conferences, it’s awfully hard to conduct a power-meeting. Or when the baby insists on attention, I can’t focus on planning a client’s event.

But plenty of children grow up close to their parents even when they endured latch-key after-hours or sunrise-to-dusk day care. And plenty of women attain the silver seat. Do enough observant Jews establish themselves on Wall Street or in retail?

I’m not criticizing my tradition, mind you. I love being Jewish, love the way my lit candles flicker on Friday night and the fact that my children look forward to Shabbat with a passion I never had for ritual when I was young.

I just can’t sustain the lock-the-doors, stop-all-business approach that orthodoxy dictates. Right now my balance of one-week-on, one-week-off is perfect enough for me. Because you know a candlelight yoga afternoon is just as rejuvenating as a cholent-induced nap.

Every day does not have to resemble the one before it. Every morning, I awake when my body has had enough rest and I rejoice in the new chance I’ve been given at life.

The series of moments takes me through the day to come. Driven by a sense of wonderment and awe, I remember all the fantastic times of my life until then, kept in a little velvet pouch inside me as a personal locus stone.

I permit myself to dream, too, of moments-to-come, but only briefly. For I am ever aware of the fact that what I hold in my hand is this moment only, this right-now, and if I waste it with worry or dread or regret, it, too, will disappear like the night.

And so today…I march into the dreary gray of almost-winter skies, and receive my children back at 11 a.m. with punch and vigor. Hugs abound. We meet my parents for brunch, then Asher and Eliana ice skate. We buy new stories at the Jewish book fair and groceries for a week’s worth of meals to sustain us.

Then return home as the sun sets to sup on soup and salad and crusty bread, turn the water on hot to bask in the settling-down, and finally clamber under blankets all together, with books, with unspoken reverence, for the moments we are absolutely, engulfingly together.

I waited for the moment of clarity, when the ingredients came together into dough, clumpy enough to clean the inside of the bowl. Lid off, I pulled the tacky clump and plopped it into a bowl to sit the day and grow.

That night, the kids and I gathered around the counter. Each of us pressed our fingertips into the dough, stretching it round on the baking stones, then smearing pizza sauce and sprinkling cheese and chopped olives onto our own creations.

It baked up puffy and crisp, cheese an orange bubbling sea.

Every chop a moment, every slice a sort of manna. From disparate ingredients to a whole something, we created a simple meal: pizza, salad, sweet corn cobs and green beans to dip in hummus.

All things good from the earth and bounty. Flavors and scents, sensory touches all around, until at last, the sun had set into the darkness that started the day and we were all tired in the upper rooms.

I laid in bed beside each child for a quiet time of connection. A few words, sloppy hugs and close-to-the-ear kisses. Those moments precious and fleeting.

Every night, Eliana creeps into bed beside me, no words spoken, just a desire for closeness. Last Sunday night, back from Boston, the house silent in their absence, I missed the presence of another warm body.

And then Monday came and they returned home to me, and I to them.

Tonight, different ingredients into completeness. Tonight, all of us around the table, different words, same goal. Tonight, another chance for love.

I hadn’t lit candles. I hadn’t said a single blessing. I hadn’t ushered in the distinction from one day to another.

Still, it was a special day of sorts. In Boston visiting my law-school-student cousin Kyle, the weekend had been long-in-coming and a veritable vacation: no laptop lugged along, no packed itinerary to fulfill.

It was a weekend of exploration and reconnection, of simulated sibling-esque connection. We hiked through the city’s Emerald Necklace until we faced a view so resplendent in Puritanical church spears and russet-hued trees fading toward winter.

Even in early November, the market square was full of produce. I paid one dollar to snack on a quart of sweet strawberries, while Kyle pulled ruby seeds from the heart of a pomegranate.

And then, once back in my formal routine, I caught echoes of the news.

The day before this historic presidential election, the first non-white candidate’s grandmother died. Tears threatened to spill from my eyes as I drove the children to school.

“That’s so sad,” I choked out. “That’s just so sad.”

And since I believe that we die at the perfect time and live as long as we have a job left to do on this planet, I pondered the meaning of this timing.

Did Obama need his mother-figure only to see him get this far? Does it mean somehow there will be an upset and he will lose, so God spared her the sight of seeing his defeat? Or does it mean something else entirely?

Regardless of how each of us votes today, we are all infinitely and spiritually connected. Whichever way the coin toss lands, whichever story we start to tell tomorrow, we are one nation of infinite minds.

I know she is watching from beyond the clouds, supremely proud, completely at rest.

The air cools, and the days shorten. I don’t like the additional darkness, waking in blackness and finishing the dinner dishes to a backdrop of black sky. But I chop vegetables and garlic for soups to warm the soul and bake breads so the house smells enveloping.

As I drove the kids to school this morning, I noticed that leaves are crisping and colors fading to similarity. Soon, I told them, the leaves will cover the ground and the trees will be bare crooked arms aching toward the sky.

And it occurred to me then that fall is fleeting, this beauty, this moment, a stamp of artistic brilliance so brief. Oh the metaphor.

I wanted a fall wedding, silky white dress diamond-like against a backdrop of autumnal color. But family obligations on both sides forced me to marry in the dog days of summer, relegating our outdoor pictures to the blacktop of the hotel’s curving driveway, the only color coming from hand-planted gardens of ordinary flowers.

With that marriage ended, I say now that if I ever marry again, it will be small and quiet, on an island beach, with a woman facilitating a simple ceremony. I am tired of dreaming.

When I was married, I had fairly frequent dreams of my college love. They were always passionate and I woke, fraught with trepidation for what it meant.

I don’t dream anymore. Or if I do, it’s something benign and hilarious. I certainly don’t spend any time analyzing the meaning behind it - especially since a therapist once told me all characters in a dream represent different facets of the dreamer herself.

It’s been nearly two years since I last visited Israel. Now, when I think of my children spending consecutive days with their father, I plot my next adventure. I’ve never hiked in the Banyas. I’ve never visited my favorite place alone. I’ve never woken to Shakshuka and Leben without a baby to feed, someone else’s minutes to count.

“Mommy, can your sweet tooth fall out?” Asher asked me yesterday.

On the way to school, he asked why the penguins don’t fall off Antarctica if it’s on the bottom of the world. After gravity and the magnetic pull, the conversation found its way into space travel and astronauts and aliens, which Asher insisted aren’t real.

 “Well, we don’t really know that for sure,” I said.

 So he and Eliana then put forth for the rest of the drive to school about the life and trials of space aliens.

 “If you were an astronaut, they could come into your spaceship and kill you,” Eliana said, eyes wide.

 “That can’t happen,” Asher said. “Because they only stay in their own spaceships.”

 His sister nodded at his gospel.

 “If they touch you, you get a rash,” she said definitively.

 At school, I hugged them out of the car and placed them squarely on the sidewalk. As I drove away, the sky was charcoal gray but in its eastern corner, a painting of yellow, orange and white clouds carved a half-moon of brightness in the morning. 

When I was a student at Forest Elementary School in Farmington Hills, I walked up a slow hill from my house to get to school. Fifth-graders, the kings of the school, wore bright-orange sashes and lifted their arms to a T when cars passed. Safety squad.

Only one tomboy joined the boys outside - most girls joined the service squad inside the building, ensuring kids walked instead of ran down the halls.

I don’t remember elementary school as a safe haven. What stands out for me is the torment of fifth-grade, when my frizzy hair and rolled-up jeans (not Gloria Vanderbilt or Jordache) were the subject of peer taunting. I’d walk down the hall to Mrs. Von Soosten’s third-grade and ask to speak to my sister.

When Jody emerged from the classroom, Idissolved into tears and my little sister with the cute pigtails and silly grin hugged me. What I come back to all these years later is not the two girls, Alicia Love and Erica Feuer, who stood by me during my loser-year, but my sister, who comforted me, and my brother, who carried my flute case home from school.

I was terrible at playing flute. And I was bossy. (Two things that haven’t changed!) But the rest is a swirling mirage of memories - sex ed in the form of a Disney movie where women had points for feet and were warned not to take too-hot showers and field day where we collected dandelions and made a salad of the greens.

My parents considered sending me to Detroit Country Day School - I was smart, and I welcomed the notion of escape to a new school, where I could start fresh. Instead, I enrolled at Warner Middle School and joined the sixth-grade, where I found friends and acceptance.

We played ghost in the graveyard with neighborhood kids and jumped on the Castlemans’ trampoline after school. My childhood was less free than the Simms kids who are 15 years my senior, but more free than today. I let my kids play in the backyard because I fool myself into thinking the fence protects them from predators. I punch the numbers of my house alarm before I go to sleep, thinking it protects me from my fears.

Is life that much scarier today than it was in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s? Or are we more fearful?

Years ago, my best friend Katie bought me a book about Jewish meditation - but I have yet to crack open the cover. A few weeks ago, another friend told me in-depth about her meditation practice and channeling - which inspired me enough to visit this site.

Then last night, at V’s Red Tent, I was handed a piece of paper imploring me to “live consciously, live deeply,” which said the following:

You are about to embark on a journey
a soulful journey
a sisterhood of connection
a safe haven
…our angels and universal guidance assist us
The journey is within - I need intention, community, a place to begin…

This paper was given to women at the last meeting, where they meditated to beckon the spirits of women past and present to join them on their journey.

In the past six months, two women named Lynn and one named Carolyn have walked into my life (each spelling her name differently). I am in touch with at least three Jims these days. And my youngest child’s middle name, Matan, is the most common word in my house. The kids use it as everyone’s second name - Mommy Matan!

Lynne (Lynn, Lyn) means near a lake - a body of water is symbolic of the circle of life, the womb, nurturing, women.

Jim, short for James, means supplanter in Hebrew.

Matan is Hebrew for gift.

I’m not yet sure what everything means, but I believe very much in signs. Years ago, as I approached college graduation and planned to move to New York, my father gave me the phone number of a friend’s daughter on the Upper West Side. She was looking for a fourth roommate, so I called - but when she told me she kept kosher and observed Shabbat, I said it wouldn’t work. I was as far from religious as could be.

That happened several times, until one day I was hiking in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming with a Gentile lover, and spent the entire eight-hour hike extolling the virtues of observing the Jewish Sabbath.

Back then, I ignored every mention of or introduction to religious Judaism. But the idea kept cycling back before my eyes. I eventually spent 10 years committed to living that way because I found it compelling and inspirational.

Although I’m not strictly religious anymore, I am deeply spiritual and somewhat observant. The signs kept coming until I was ready to hear the message fully.

So now, with my ever-active sixth sense, I wonder what the conflagration of signs are trying to tell me. If I meditate, whose voice will I hear?

Change creeps up on you. One day, he just didn’t want to sleep in the crib anymore. It was distressing to be put there, and so he slept the night in the pitch-black of my room, beside me in the king-size bed, until at 3 a.m., he thundered to the carpet. It was time, his time to move to the next square.

I am learning to use what I have to make something flavorful. Tonight, I broiled the softest lamb chops, a gift from the packing plant I visited yesterday with the Hiller’s meat director. Dotted with cracked black pepper and Lawry’s salt and drizzled with soy sauce, they sizzled to a golden brown, the fat glistening and bubbly.

I boiled quinoa in water and diced celery, shallots, garlic, dates, slivered almonds to saute in olive oil. Mixed it all together, and it was sublime.

Slivered a sweet potato into strips, sliced carrots length-wise, cut an onion into half-moons, everything roasted at 410 degrees with balsamic vinegar. Autumnal sweetness.

At the table, I blessed my children as I do every Friday night. The candlelight danced against the red wall like light gleaming off a disco ball, a sparkle in a smiling eye. The room was alight with energy and breath.

The recipes, impromptu, thrown together by virtue of what was left in the refrigerator. I made a sensuous, delightful meal from what was already there. Nothing gone to waste, no forgotten flavor shoved to the back of the cold shelf.

I don’t always do this - but now, I can’t imagine why not. Use what I have to create meaning and flavor. Use what I have - it is enough.

Although I sent Asher to bed early as a punishment, he crept downstairs before 9, while the candlelight was flickering low against the shiny candleholder cups. Maybe I’m a softie or maybe it was ok to let the punishment leave its mark and move on.

I beckoned to him in the low light. In his red and blue cowboy pajamas, my eldest son climbed over my legs and nestled against the inside corner of the couch. Outside, three people passed in the dark rain. House lights emanated reflections of droplets yet to evaporate.

All was quiet. A few minutes later, he climbed off the couch, headed for the bathroom.

“Sheesh,” my son exclaimed. “It’s really dark. Walk me upstairs?”

I slid my hand into his and ascended the soft steps. When he was done, I thought he’d return to his room. But soon, he was beside me again, his breathing turning even and rhythmic.

My parents often say I shouldn’t let my children sleep beside me. Why not? We are connected like this for such a short time.

In the shadows of the gloaming, I put my hand on my son’s warm leg, and was reassured by the thump-thump of a heartbeat coursing its way along. Invigorated by his presence.

No moment a mistake, and they all are so fleeting.

When I said hello to Willie Johnson, he grabbed me in a hug. “Hey! Lynne!”

He ushered me inside, where a mob of people including two of his sons waited for the mayor, six professional ball players, members of the media and others to inaugurate his new court.

I wrote about Johnson for AARP: The Magazine, an article soon to be released. The basketball court outside his northwest Detroit house has drawn neighborhood kids every day for nearly 30 years. Better than any patrol car, this fenced-in court and Johnson’s oversight keep the neighborhood safe, clean and drug-free.

“If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything,” was Johnson’s quote on the back of the kids’ shirts. He’s just an average guy with a big heart who has kept countless kids on the straight and narrow.

In the corner of the court, I met a Detroit police officer, Joseph Weekley, whose effort to create SWAT for Tots brings toys to homeless and abused children every holiday season. He kicked his shoe against the new asphalt as his partner proclaimed his innovative big heart.

In my email inbox this afternoon, a blast from Eat Local Food, promoting soothing farmer market art.

Keeping it local…

This report (which you can find by subscribing here) describes five dimensions of a supreme leadership model:

* meaning: using your core strengths in an inspiring direction

* managing energy: identifying the source of your energy and how you can harness it

* positive framing: adopting a more constructive way to view your world

* connecting: relationships, belonging, true mentorship

* engaging: finding your voice and becoming self-reliant

Simply put, how we treat people - and how we treat ourselves! - is crucial to success. It sounds so common-sense. But unfortunately, in the realm of getting busy, doing work, and running between tasks, we forget the basics. And that is our downfall.

I became religious ten years ago because I thought it was a path toward meaning and good living. It can be. It wasn’t for me - because I was looking outside myself for answers.

We all hold the answers. We just need to quiet the noise to listen to our inner voices.

A friend just called to tell me her doctor’s opinion of my last appointment. A distant acquaintance repeatedly asks a family friend about details of my sister’s cancer. My daughter shares conversation fragments about her father’s relatives’ opinions of me.

I can’t help what others think nor that they choose to spend their free time concerned about the details of my life.

I wake before the sun these days. I snuggle my children, make them breakfast, pack their school lunches. I work in the silence of the pre-dawn, doing the best that I can for people who trust me to create something special. Each day, I see, speak to, hug, drive past and encounter so many people, all on their own journeys, with their own concerns, driven by inner fears and worries.

I have learned to silence my negative voices. But when they come from outside of me, I have absolutely no control.

What you send out to the universe is what you will get back.

This past week, religious Jews sat in huts decorated with harvest fruits as a testament of their faith and supplication to God. Sukkahs are beautiful little islands of celebration.

They’re also imperfect hurried constructions adhering to exact measurements and in which debates occur over whether the men are permitted to sit in the “non-kosher” part where the gutters overhang the evergreen branches. Sometimes, the men don’t even smile as they recite blessings that have become all too familiar.

Look down your nose at me if you so please. Speak badly if it makes you feel bigger.

But know that we all start from the same innocent cradle, with the same potential. I embrace my path. I plant pine trees and tulips around its perimeter. When the flowers fade in summer heat, I know they will return the next spring, without any effort.

You who lurk behind this blog to spy on what I’m doing and how I believe. I’m not afraid to share my story or my questions.

My business, Your People LLC, is built on the concept of creating connections between company and client. Authentic relationships.

I don’t pretend to have all the insight and answers nor do I profess to be the marketing guru of the world. I act on instinct and use my voice to lead me on an upward trajectory toward the proverbial oval office. (No, I’m not vying for Sarah Palin’s place.)

Women stumble along the way to the top because they begin to doubt themselves. It’s not hard to do, when everyone else voices opinions of my every move.

I’ll get there, in time - by believing in myself and acting with authenticity.