Often we see a couple who has separated or divorced and look with sadness at the ‘failure’ of their relationship. But if both people learned what they were meant to learn, then that relationship was a success.

I think you have to grieve the loss of youth before you can claim the joy on the other side of it.

The power to rethink a situation is our greatest tool for transforming the world. This notion is taking hold in medicine, in business, in education. But not in politics and the media. They are the last holdouts of old-paradigm thinking.

I think the heartbreak of September 11 - America's grief not only over the loss of life but also the loss of our own innocence -has expanded us as people because it has tenderized our hearts. On a psychological level, the American people have matured as a result of that awful day.

To the extent we are perceiving anyone's guilt -choosing to focus on the errors of their personality rather than the eternal innocence of their spirit - we're closing our hearts, deflecting a miracle and causing our own inevitable suffering.

It's funny, I see Wendy Kaminer herself as a kind of guru - a guru of the fashionably cynical set. Yet she uses the term "guru" to minimize my career, to marginalize my thoughts and to trivialize my work, as well as those of others.

I had an experience that probably is shared by many parents. When my daughter was born, I felt viscerally connected to generations before and after me in a way that took me by surprise.