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The Transformative Power of Embracing Ordinariness

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Everyone wants to be extraordinary. To stand out. To be the exception. But the truth is, most of life happens in the ordinary—and that’s where transformation actually lives. We are taught to chase uniqueness as if being ordinary means being invisible. Yet ordinariness is not a flaw; it’s the foundation of humanity. It’s the shared rhythm that connects us—the morning routines, the small kindnesses, the quiet persistence that keeps the world turning. When we stop resisting our ordinariness, we begin to see its beauty. We realize that being ordinary doesn’t mean being unimportant; it means being real. Understanding and accepting our ordinariness frees us from the exhausting pursuit of comparison. It allows us to make the most of what we are and what we have. When we stop trying to be the outlier, we start noticing the richness of the middle—the steady, imperfect, deeply human space where growth actually happens. Ordinariness is not the opposite of greatness. It’s the soil from which great...
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Prccerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Brazil

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  My experience in getting to know Brazil was very much like my experience in getting to know the USA, my home country. Like the US, Brazil is large—and I was lucky to be able to work in cities in nearly all regions. That allowed me to hear a lot of regional dialects, and, like in the USA, I could understand some better than others. (My favorite dialect was that of the area around Porto Alegre; it was so lyrical and easy to emulate. But then, I have a very special place in my heart for Porto Alegre, where I worked at many different tasks.) Before going to Brazil, I decided I needed to be able to understand and use the language, so I picked up a language learning book and some tapes. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to spend dedicated time in language learning, so I had to resort to a crash course on the airplane there. Little did I realize in advance that it really would be a crash course. I took Delta Airlines from San Francisco through Los Angeles to Sao Paolo. BUT, it w...
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The Philosophical Roots of Deep and Shallow Processing

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  When we talk about deep versus shallow processing today—especially in education or language learning—it can sound like a modern pedagogical slogan. But the idea has far deeper roots, both in cognitive psychology and in philosophy. The distinction itself was formally introduced by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in their landmark 1972 paper, Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research . Their central claim was deceptively simple: memory is not determined by where information is stored, but by how it is processed. They proposed a continuum: Shallow processing : attention to surface features—sound, appearance, structure Deep processing : attention to meaning—interpretation, association, integration The deeper the processing, the more durable the memory trace. This framework challenged the dominant model of the time, developed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968, which treated memory as a set of discrete storage systems (sensory, sh...
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