Norma was one of the many people over the last twenty years who gave me advice. She was born in 1922 and last week, she was laid to rest. "Consider wearing lipstick," she once told me.

I've been clearing out my office files at a transition point in a long career. Some of the intractable issues we were so incredibly frothed up about ten years ago have become ...well, non-issues.

A psychological term for something that feels familiar to most of us, hypervigilance is technically what we experience when we're extremely wary of danger. All our senses are charged up, alert to detect a potential assault.