Creating Sparks That Last & All Things Relationships

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays   However you celebrate and enjoy the festive season, may you strike the perfect balance between fun with family and friends and peace and harmony within. On that note, I am seeing the year out with my final blog post. In this post I have two polar opposite book reviews, yet both equally important in defining our relationship with ourself and others. Goodbye Again: A memoir by Candace Cahill Candace almost started her life as a young adult on the wrong foot. She made a decision almost entirely alone, that would have resounding aftershocks on her life.  Candace chose to provide her baby with a better life by opting for adoption. She agonized over the decision with minimal help and clung onto every update she received of her baby until the updates stopped completely.  By this stage, Candace had met a partner who supported her better than she could have imagined, since hiding her shame from the world previously. This more mature love, as co...

There's Always a Solution I said this to a friend the other day who was struggling with tech stuff. She was so grateful for the boost that  she persevered for an entire week , but she did it!  So let’s just expand on the notion here, that ' there's always a solution.' Elora Canne - Memoir Writer I'm delighted to share my conversation with you, from the Living Big Mindfully podcast where host, Kate Champion, and I discussed many later-in-life relationship topics.  But I'm particularly interested in sharing with you, the notion that there is indeed always a solution .  Not only in everyday life situations, as told above, but also in those deeper, more difficult to navigate situations as you'll discover on the podcast. There is always a way around a hurdle,  even if you can't jump over it. To listen in on our conversation, insights and solutions, tap this link:  Living Big Mindfully Podcast Book News: 🫂 Allow me to focus, just for a minute, on those solut...

Learn From It My favourite thing to do is learn from my mistakes. Seriously. I love nothing better than to analyze a situation, how it went wrong, what went wrong and how to make it better. Note: I intentionally did not say 'how to fix it' because 'fixing it' denotes that something is broken. WE ARE NOT BROKEN, WE ARE HUMAN and humans are complex. And I think we all know by now, that no relationship is without its problems 100% of the time. So back to 'Love is a Crush' - it's essentially an emotion of intense infatuation that either rapidly evolves into a deeper emotion of care and affection, or not. Of course, I'm referring to romantic relationships because we can all acknowledge that we have the capacity to encompass dynamics of love such as parents, children, siblings, friends and family outside of a romantic relationship. I've spent nearly 4 decades married to my husband. 4 Decades!! I'm sure you can imagine some of the changes we would have ...

 The Humility of the Cover Art Overlooking the hills of Tuscany at sunset from the courtyard of San Gimignano Photograph by yours truly, Elora Canne To continue our exploration of seeing EN ROUTE through the eyes of the author, I'm going to give you sneak peek into the humility that surrounds the cover of my memoir. • What scene resonated with you most on a personal level? (Why? How did it make you feel?) Let me start by saying, ouch, the fact that this photograph ended up being the cover of my memoir is beyond ironic! I had read a memoir about the Montepulciano region in Italy and really wanted to visit the area, alas we couldn't get there and visited San Gimignano instead. So to begin with, we weren't even meant to be there and that ended up being my book cover. Secondly!!! Secondly, my husband and I both took a sunset photo through the same arch at the same time and I wholeheartedly bragged that my photo was better. (It was, despite being off-centre!) Nevertheless, once ...