Nearly every state stay-at-home order permits walking and exercising outside and that’s a good thing.

Getting outside and moving around is more essential than ever, and like many of you, we’re walking more than ever. Even guys who run or work out in the gym or participate in fitness classes are using walking as a form of exercise, some of them, like my husband, for the first time. Although I’ve been going into work for the past several weeks, this week, I’m trying out teleworking, and I’m exhausted. I don’t know whether it’s figuring out the tech side of working from home when everyone else is at home or the temptation to just sit in front of the computer, especially when all of your meetings are teleconferences or WebX or Teams meetings. But one thing is for sure. working from home, or just being home, day after day, is physically and mentally draining.

Here it is March 7 and TWO years since I published Getting My Bounce Back. Seriously. What a whirlwind. I spent the better part of 2017-18 pulling the book together, getting an agent, and landing a publishing contract. Other first-time authors report the experience can be overwhelming but also thrilling, and I’d say it’s been exactly like that for me.

So where am I with all this? Especially since you haven’t heard much from me lately.

Last year, around this time, about a month before Mia and Julian’s wedding, I was sitting in Dr. David Moss’s office telling him that I had a debilitating range of motion issue in my shoulder that was preventing me from performing a dance Adin had choreographed for the surprise flash mob at the reception.

Dr. Moss smiled. He’s a member of the practice at Washington Orthopedics and Sports Medicine that has supported me among their clients that come from the Washington, D.C., professional sports and dance worlds. He removed a joint from one of my fingers probably on the same day he might have fixed a Caps finger.

I was having lunch at a restaurant in Princeton and talking about my sense of accomplishment after figuring out how to watch TV on my laptop when a young woman sitting at the table next to me turned her head and said, “Are you talking about Younger?”

That was Tessa Albertson, a student at Princeton. She played the role of Caitlin, Liza’s daughter, while she was in high school.

Once you train yourself to consciously absorb the positive experience or to tell yourself you are absorbing the positive experience, the payoff is you’ll begin to create new neural connections that transform passing mental states, such as feeling cheerful, into lasting neural traits, i.e., being a cheerful person.

Maybe this is what happens subconsciously to people who live amid incredible natural beauty. I suspected this when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’m wondering if this is what is happening in Jamaica.

Whenever you put your ideas out there into the universe, it's always scary and, from my perspective, takes courage. 

Yet whether you're a painter or a director or a choreographer or a writer, regardless of your intention, once you make your stuff public, it's like a free-for-all. It's 100 percent up to your audience to make sense of your message, interpret or reinterpret your ideas, and like or dislike your work or even you.

It took me a while to figure it out, but scheduling time in my day to exercise, even to walk for 40 minutes, has made me better at everything. And ask my kids - it's made me a better mom! Now, as Mother's Day is around the corner, here's what I'm loving!

“How would you feel about categorizing your book as self-help or personal growth?”

I was having a telephone conversation with an editor at a publishing house about my memoir. I had finished the manuscript in August and had been pitching the project to literary agents and publishers, taking online workshops on how to publish a book, and tweaking the pages based on feedback from readers.

I was never sure whether it was a good idea to call my book a memoir. I’m always visiting bookstores to look at what’s on the memoir shelf or the self-help, psychology, or personal growth shelves, so I get why she was asking the question.

It’s my fitness journey, that’s true, but I wouldn’t say fitness defines me.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m good with that.”

Do you remember that week in 2010 when a volcano eruption disrupted air travel through much of Europe? I do. My husband, Bob, was on business travel in Amsterdam at the time and got stuck. Poor Bob. For a day or two he contemplated returning to the United States by getting a train to England first and then crossing the Atlantic on board the Queen Mary 2 from Southampton to New York.

That volcanic eruption? It was in Iceland. And if business wasn’t slow enough on that arctic island, that dark cloud didn’t help.

Since then, the fog has lifted for Iceland, and Reykjavik, the capital and largest city in Iceland, is one of the hottest places to visit, even when it’s below freezing much of the year. And for good reason. The tourism industry is incredibly strong - there are more than 600 tour companies operating in Iceland - and the major tourist spots are well run, offering good food and knowledgeable guides.

It's ridiculous that after all these years I'm still fighting with myself at night to wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror as I'm brushing my teeth and think, what's the worst that could happen?

And then I clean my face, removing any makeup around my eyes, exfoliate, use toner, apply products my dermatologist prescribed for me and then serum and nighttime moisturizer on my face and neck. The whole thing takes too long, but there aren't any short cuts. I've tried.

The other night, as I was having this conversation with myself in the mirror, I noticed my skin was looking not bad. I've still got that lived-in look, but the lines in my forehead, in particular, were, without a doubt, less prominent.